Motivational Quotes

Books - reading

Books give not wisdom where none was before. But where some is, there reading makes it more.

- Harington, John

Best Quotes about Books - reading

We should be as careful of the books we read, as of the company we keep. The dead very often have more power than the living.

Edwards, Tryon

To read well, that is, to read true books in a true spirit, is a noble exercise, and one that will task the reader more than any other exercise which the customs of the day esteem. It requires a training such as the athletes underwent, the steady intention almost of the whole life to this object.

Thoreau, Henry David

Next to acquiring good friends, the best acquisition is that of good books.

Colton, Charles Caleb

A house without books is like a room without windows. No man has a right to bring up his children without surrounding them with books, if he has the means to buy them. It is a wrong to his family. Children learn to read by being in the presence of books. The love of knowledge comes with reading and grows upon it. And the love of knowledge, in a young mind, is almost always a warrant against the inferior excitement of passions and vices.

Mann, Horace

I suggest that the only books that influence us are those for which we are ready, and which have gone a little further down our particular path than we have yet got ourselves.

Forster, Edward M.

What is important is not to be able to read rapidly, but to be able to decide what not to read.

Mccay, James T.

A book may be compared to your neighbor: if it be good, it cannot last too long; if bad, you cannot get rid of it too early.

Brooke, Rupert

One sheds one's sicknesses in books -- repeats and presents again one's emotions, to be master of them.

Lawrence, D. H.

You can either read something many times in order to be assured that you got it all, or else you can define your purpose and use techniques which will assure that you have met it and gotten what you need.

Kump, Peter

10.

A successful book cannot afford to be more than ten percent new.

Mcluhan, Marshall

11.

Books, like friends, should be few and well chosen. Like friends, too, we should return to them again and again for, like true friends, they will never fail us -- never cease to instruct -- never cloy.

Colton, Charles Caleb

12.

The failure to read good books both enfeebles the vision and strengthens our most fatal tendency --the belief that the here and now is all there is.

Bloom, Allan

13.

A big leather-bound volume makes an ideal razor strap. A thin book is useful to stick under a table with a broken caster to steady it. A large, flat atlas can be used to cover a window with a broken pane. And a thick, old-fashioned heavy book with a clasp is the finest thing in the world to throw at a noisy cat.

Twain, Mark

14.

For a good book has this quality, that it is not merely a petrifaction of its author, but that once it has been tossed behind, like Deucalion's little stone, it acquires a separate and vivid life of its own.

Lejeune, Caroline

15.

I read the newspaper avidly. It is my one form of continuous fiction.

Bevan, Aneurin

16.

I've never know any trouble than an hour's reading didn't assuage.

Secondat, Charles de

17.

The age of the book is almost gone.

Steiner, George

18.

A book is like a man -- clever and dull, brave and cowardly, beautiful and ugly. For every flowering thought there will be a page like a wet and mangy mongrel, and for every looping flight a tap on the wing and a reminder that wax cannot hold the feathers firm too near the sun.

Steinbeck, John

19.

A book is a part of life, a manifestation of life, just as much as a tree or a horse or a star. It obeys its own rhythms, its own laws, whether it be a novel, a play, or a diary. The deep, hidden rhythm of life is always there -- that of the pulse, the heart beat.

Miller, Henry

20.

Thank you for sending me a copy of your book -- I'll waste no time reading it.

Hadas, Moses

21.

Every man is a volume if you know how to read him.

Channing, William Ellery

22.

There is more treasure in books than in all the pirates loot on Treasure Island and best of all, you can enjoy these riches every day of your life.

Disney, Walt

23.

A bad book is as much of a labor to write as a good one; it comes as sincerely from the author's soul.

Huxley, Aldous

24.

God be thanked for books; they are the voices of the distant and the dead, and make us heirs of the spiritual life of past ages.

Channing, William Ellery

25.

The reading of all good books is like a conversation with all the finest men of past centuries.

Descartes, Rene

26.

There is no robber worse than a bad book.

Proverb, Italian

27.

Books, books, books had found the secret of a garret-room piled high with cases in my father's name; Piled high, packed large, --where, creeping in and out among the giant fossils of my past, like some small nimble mouse between the ribs of a mastodon, I nibbled here and there at this or that box, pulling through the gap, in heats of terror, haste, victorious joy, the first book first. And how I felt it beat under my pillow, in the morning's dark. An hour before the sun would let me read! My books!

Browning, Elizabeth Barrett

28.

Books in a large university library system: 2, 000,000. Books in an average large city library: 1 0,000. Average number of books in a chain bookstore: 30, 000. Books in an average neighborhood branch library: 20, 000.

Horowitz, Lois

29.

A novel is a mirror carried along a main road.

Stendhal, Henri B.

30.

When a book raises your spirit, and inspires you with noble and manly thoughts, seek for no other test of its excellence. It is good, and made by a good workman.

Bruyere, Jean De La

31.

To buy books would be a good thing if we also could buy the time to read them.

Schopenhauer, Arthur

32.

There are books so alive that you're always afraid that while you weren't reading, the book has gone and changed, has shifted like a river; while you went on living, it went on living too, and like a river moved on and moved away. No one has stepped twice into the same river. But did anyone ever step twice into the same book?

Tsvetaeva, Marina

33.

This book is not to be tossed lightly aside, but to be hurled with great force.

Parker, Dorothy

34.

When you have mastered numbers, you will in fact no longer be reading numbers, any more than you read words when reading books You will be reading meanings.

Geneen, Harold S.

35.

The classics are only primitive literature. They belong to the same class as primitive machinery and primitive music and primitive medicine.

Leacock, Stephen B.

36.

With one day's reading a man may have the key in his hands.

Pound, Ezra

37.

The real risks for any artist are taken in pushing the work to the limits of what is possible, in the attempt to increase the sum of what it is possible to think. Books become good when they go to this edge and risk falling over it --when they endanger the artist by reason of what he has, or has not, artistically dared.

Rushdie, Salman

38.

When we read a story, we inhabit it. The covers of the book are like a roof and four walls. What is to happen next will take place within the four walls of the story. And this is possible because the story's voice makes everything its own.

Berger, John

39.

A library is thought in cold storage.

Samuel, Herbert

40.

I divide all readers into two classes: those who read to remember and those who read to forget.

Phelps, William Lyon

41.

What gunpowder did for war the printing press has done for the mind.

Phillips, Wendell

42.

Books are divided into two classes, the books of the hour and the books of all time.

Ruskin, John

43.

The books that the world calls immoral are the books that show the world its own shame.

Wilde, Oscar

44.

Reading the Scriptures is an uplifting experience.

45.

The things I want to know are in books; my best friend is the man who'll get me a book I ain't read.

Lincoln, Abraham

46.

In the case of good books, the point is not how many of them you can get through, but rather how many can get through to you.

Adler, Mortimer J.

47.

What is reading, but silent conversation.

Landor, Walter Savage

48.

Books constitute capital. A library book lasts as long as a house, for hundreds of years. It is not, then, an article of mere consumption but fairly of capital, and often in the case of professional men, setting out in life, it is their only capital.

Jefferson, Thomas

49.

The flood of print has turned reading into a process of gulping rather than savoring

Chappell, Warren

50.

Fiction reveals truth that reality obscures.

West, Jessamyn