Motivational Quotes

Books - reading

The mortality of all inanimate things is terrible to me, but that of books most of all.

- Howells, William Dean

Best Quotes about Books - reading

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

Read, read, read. Read everything-- trash, classics, good and bad, and see how they do it. Just like a carpenter who works as an apprentice and studies the master. Read! You'll absorb it. Then write. If it is good, you'll find out. If it's not, throw it out the window.

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

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

Harington, John

Books are standing counselors and preachers, always at hand, and always disinterested; having this advantage over oral instructors, that they are ready to repeat their lesson as often as we please.

Chambers, Oswald

The printing press is either the greatest blessing or the greatest curse of modern times, sometimes one forgets which it is.

Barrie, Sir James M.

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

Pound, Ezra

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

When I am dead, I hope it may be said: His sins were scarlet, but his books were read.

Belloc, Hilaire

10.

Except a living man there is nothing more wonderful than a book! a message to us from the dead -- from human souls we never saw, who lived, perhaps, thousands of miles away. And yet these, in those little sheets of paper, speak to us, arouse us, terrify us, teach us, comfort us, open their hearts to us as brothers.

Kingsley, Charles

11.

As writers become more numerous, it is natural for readers to become more indolent; whence must necessarily arise a desire of attaining knowledge with the greatest possible ease.

Goldsmith, Oliver

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.

Somewhere, everywhere, now hidden, now apparent in what ever is written down, is the form of a human being. If we seek to know him, are we idly occupied?

Woolf, Virginia

14.

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

Byron, Lord

15.

Thy books should, like thy friends, not many be, yet such wherein men may thy judgment see.

Wycherley, William

16.

I used to walk to school with my nose buried in a book.

Coolio

17.

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

18.

The newest books are those that never grow old.

Jackson, George Holbrook

19.

There was a time when the world acted on books; now books act on the world.

Joubert, Joseph

20.

We ought to reverence books; to look on them as useful and mighty things. If they are good and true, whether they are about religion, politics, farming, trade, law, or medicine, they are the message of Christ, the maker of all things -- the teacher of all truth.

Kingsley, Charles

21.

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

Milton, John

22.

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

Chappell, Warren

23.

Books had instant replay long before televised sports.

Williams, Bert

24.

A novel is never anything, but a philosophy put into images.

Camus, Albert

25.

A book is a mirror: If an ass peers into it, you can't expect an apostle to look out.

Lichtenberg, Georg C.

26.

A person of mature years and ripe development, who is expecting nothing from literature but the corroboration and renewal of past ideas, may find satisfaction in a lucidity so complete as to occasion no imaginative excitement, but young and ambitious students are not content with it. They seek the excitement because they are capable of the growth that it accompanies.

Cooley, Charles Horton

27.

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.

28.

A good book is the very essence of a good man. His virtues survive in it, while the foibles and faults of his actual life are forgotten. All the goodly company of the excellent and great sit around my table, or look down on me from yonder shelves, waiting patiently to answer my questions and enrich me with their wisdom. A precious book is a foretaste of immortality.

Cuyler, Theodore L.

29.

There are two kinds of books. Those that no one reads and those that no one ought to read.

Mencken, H. L.

30.

Americans will listen, but they do not care to read. War and Peace must wait for the leisure of retirement, which never really comes: meanwhile it helps to furnish the living room. Blockbusting fiction is bought as furniture. Unread, it maintains its value. Read, it looks like money wasted. Cunningly, Americans know that books contain a person, and they want the person, not the book.

Burgess, Anthony

31.

I love to lose myself in other men's minds. When I am not walking, I am reading. I cannot sit and think; books think for me.

Lamb, Charles

32.

Reading the Scriptures is an uplifting experience.

33.

A dose of poison can do its work but once. A bad book can go on poisoning minds for generations.

Murray, William

34.

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

Hadas, Moses

35.

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

Colton, Charles Caleb

36.

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

Secondat, Charles de

37.

There are very many people who read simply to prevent themselves from thinking.

Lichtenberg, Georg C.

38.

No furniture is so charming as books.

Smith, Sydney

39.

Hypocrite reader -- my fellow -- my brother!

Baudelaire, Charles

40.

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

Twain, Mark

41.

I heard his library burned down and both books were destroyed -- and one of them hadn't even been colored in yet.

Dawkins, John

42.

Of all the ways of acquiring books, writing them oneself is regarded as the most praiseworthy method. Writers are really people who write books not because they are poor, but because they are dissatisfied with the books which they could buy but do not like.

Benjamin, Walter

43.

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

Pound, Ezra

44.

What we become depends on what we read after all the professors have finished with us. The greatest university of all is the collection of books.

Carlyle, Thomas

45.

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

Lee, Harper

46.

The good of a book lies in its being read. A book is made up of signs that speak of other signs, which in their turn speak of things. Without an eye to read them, a book contains signs that produce no concepts; therefore it is dumb.

Eco, Umberto

47.

Begin to read a book that will help you move toward your dream.

Brown, Les

48.

After all, the world is not a stage -- not to me: nor a theatre: nor a show-house of any sort. And art, especially novels, are not little theatres where the reader sits aloft and watches... and sighs, commiserates, condones and smiles. That's what you want a book to be: because it leaves you so safe and superior, with your two-dollar ticket to the show. And that's what my books are not and never will be. Whoever reads me will be in the thick of the scrimmage, and if he doesn't like it -- if he wants a safe seat in the audience -- let him read someone else.

Lawrence, D. H.

49.

There is no robber worse than a bad book.

Proverb, Italian

50.

Books are lighthouses erected in the great sea of time.

Whipple, Edwin P.