Motivational Quotes

Books - reading

The books we read should be chosen with great care, that they may be, as an Egyptian king wrote over his library, The medicines of the soul.

- Hood, Paxton

Best Quotes about Books - reading

A great book should leave you with many experiences and slightly exhausted at the end. You should live several lives while reading it.

Styron, William

The tools I need for my work are paper, tobacco, food, and a little whiskey.

Faulkner, William

Does there, I wonder, exist a being who has read all, or approximately all, that the person of average culture is supposed to have read, and that not to have read is a social sin? If such a being does exist, surely he is an old, a very old man.

Bennett, Arnold

A conventional good read is usually a bad read, a relaxing bath in what we know already. A true good read is surely an act of innovative creation in which we, the readers, become conspirators.

Bradbury, Malcolm

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

A library is thought in cold storage.

Samuel, Herbert

A book that is shut is but a block.

Fuller, Thomas

To learn to read is to light a fire; every syllable that is spelled out is a spark.

Hugo, Victor

Books are but waste paper unless we spend in action the wisdom we get from thought -- asleep. When we are weary of the living, we may repair to the dead, who have nothing of peevishness, pride, or design in their conversation.

Collier, Jeremy

10.

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.

11.

The reading or non-reading a book will never keep down a single petticoat.

Byron, Lord

12.

There is a set of religious, or rather moral, writings which teach that virtue is the certain road to happiness, and vice to misery in this world. A very wholesome and comfortable doctrine, and to which we have but one objection, namely, that it is not true.

Fielding, Henry

13.

No one can read with profit that which he cannot learn to read with pleasure.

Porter, Noah

14.

People are much more willing to lend you books than bookcases.

Twain, Mark

15.

The more sins you confess, the more books you will sell.

Proverb, American

16.

How can you dare teach a man to read until you've taught him everything else first?

Shaw, George Bernard

17.

No furniture is so charming as books.

Smith, Sydney

18.

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

Secondat, Charles de

19.

The greatest gift is the passion for reading. It is cheap, it consoles, it distracts, it excites, it gives you knowledge of the world and experience of a wide kind. It is a moral illumination.

Hardwick, Elizabeth

20.

There are worse crimes than burning books. One of them is not reading them.

Brodsky, Joseph

21.

In any situation, ask yourself: What strengths do I possess that can contribute towards accomplishing something in this situation? Then follow through.

22.

The most foolish kind of a book is a kind of leaky boat on the sea of wisdom; some of the wisdom will get in anyhow.

Holmes, Oliver Wendell

23.

A multitude of books distracts the mind.

Socrates

24.

Footnotes are the finer-suckered surfaces that allow testicular paragraphs to hold fast to the wider reality of the library.

Baker, Nicholson

25.

He that loves a book will never want a faithful friend, a wholesome counselor, a cheerful companion, an effectual comforter. By study, by reading, by thinking, one may innocently divert and pleasantly entertain himself, as in all weathers, as in all fortunes.

Barrow

26.

The great American novel has not only already been written, it has already been rejected.

Dane, Frank

27.

No man understands a deep book until he has seen and lived at least part of its contents.

Pound, Ezra

28.

One half who graduate from college never read another book.

True, Herbert

29.

She could give herself up to the written word as naturally as a good dancer to music or a fine swimmer to water. The only difficulty was that after finishing the last sentence she was left with a feeling at once hollow and uncomfortably full. Exactly like indigestion.

Rhys, Jean

30.

The mere brute pleasure of reading --the sort of pleasure a cow must have in grazing.

Chesterton, Gilbert K.

31.

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

32.

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.

33.

The books one reads in childhood, and perhaps most of all the bad and good bad books, create in one's mind a sort of false map of the world, a series of fabulous countries into which one can retreat at odd moments throughout the rest of life, and which in some cases can survive a visit to the real countries which they are supposed to represent.

Orwell, George

34.

All the known world, excepting only savage nations, is governed by books.

Voltaire

35.

Until I feared I would lose it, I never loved to read. One does not love breathing.

Lee, Harper

36.

All good books are alike in that they are truer than if they had really happened and after you are finished reading one you will feel that all that happened to you and afterwards it all belongs to you; the good and the bad, the ecstasy, the remorse, and sorrow, the people and the places and how the weather was.

Hemingway, Ernest

37.

The unread story is not a story; it is little black marks on wood pulp. The reader, reading it, makes it live: a live thing, a story.

Guin, Ursula K. Le

38.

The last thing one discovers in composing a work is what to put first.

Pascal, Blaise

39.

The man who does not read books has no advantage over the man that can not read them.

Twain, Mark

40.

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

41.

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

42.

Read Homer once, and you can read no more. For all books else appear so mean, and so poor. Verse will seem prose; but still persist to read, and Homer will be all the books you need.

Buckingham, Duke of

43.

Next, in importance to books are their titles.

Davies, Paul

44.

The books we read should be chosen with great care, that they may be, as an Egyptian king wrote over his library, The medicines of the soul.

Hood, Paxton

45.

My early and invincible love of reading I would not exchange for all the riches of India.

Gibbon, Edward

46.

I am what libraries and librarians have made me, with little assistance from a professor of Greek and poets.

Sandwell, B. K.

47.

You will find most books worth reading are worth reading twice.

Morely, John

48.

A good book, in the language of the book-sellers, is a salable one; in that of the curious, a scarce one; in that of men of sense, a useful and instructive one.

Chambers, Oswald

49.

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

50.

Who kills a man kills a reasonable creature, God's image, but thee who destroys a good book, kills reason itself.

Milton, John