Motivational Quotes

Books - reading

The newest books are those that never grow old.

- Jackson, George Holbrook

Best Quotes about Books - reading

Read nothing that you do not care to remember, and remember nothing you do not mean to use.

Blackie, Professor

Any book that helps a child to form a habit of reading, to make reading one of his deep and continuing needs, is good for him.

McKenna, Richard

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

One always tends to overpraise a long book, because one has got through it.

Forster, Edward M.

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

No story is the same to us after a lapse of time; or rather we who read it are no longer the same interpreters.

Eliot, George

Don't ask me who's influenced me. A lion is made up of the lambs he's digested, and I've been reading all my life.

Seferis, Giorgos

A real book is not one that we read, but one that reads us.

Auden, W. H.

It does not follow because many books are written by persons born in America that there exists an American literature. Books which imitate or represent the thoughts and life of Europe do not constitute an American literature. Before such can exist, an original idea must animate this nation and fresh currents of life must call into life fresh thoughts along the shore.

Fuller, Margaret

10.

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

Hugo, Victor

11.

If I have not read a book before, it is, for all intents and purposes, new to me whether it was printed yesterday or three hundred years ago.

Hazlitt, William

12.

Books are lighthouses erected in the great sea of time.

Whipple, Edwin P.

13.

My books kept me from the ring, the dog-pit, the tavern, and the saloon.

Hood, Thomas

14.

A vacuum of ideas affects people differently than a vacuum of air, otherwise readers of books would be constantly collapsing.

Lichtenberg, Georg C.

15.

Do we write books so that they shall merely be read? Don't we also write them for employment in the household? For one that is read from start to finish, thousands are leafed through, other thousands lie motionless, others are jammed against mouseholes, thrown at rats, others are stood on, sat on, drummed on, have gingerbread baked on them or are used to light pipes.

Lichtenberg, Georg C.

16.

What is the most precious, the most exciting smell awaiting you in the house when you return to it after a dozen years or so? The smell of roses, you think? No, moldering books.

Sinyavsky, Andre

17.

A novel points out that the world consists entirely of exceptions.

Carey, Joyce

18.

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

Chesterton, Gilbert K.

19.

'Tis pleasant, sure, to see one's name in print; A book's a book, although there's nothing in it.

Byron, Lord

20.

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

21.

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

Faulkner, William

22.

Today a reader, tomorrow a leader.

Fusselman, W.

23.

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

Lichtenberg, Georg C.

24.

Reading is equivalent to thinking with someone else's head instead of with one's own.

Schopenhauer, Arthur

25.

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

Dawkins, John

26.

I feel a kind of reverence for the first books of young authors. There is so much aspiration in them, so much audacious hope and trembling fear, so much of the heart's history, that all errors and shortcomings are for a while lost sight of in the amiable self assertion of youth.

Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth

27.

Books are not men and yet they stay alive.

Benet, Stephen Vincent

28.

Learning to read has been reduced to a process of mastering a series of narrow, specific, hierarchical skills. Where armed-forces recruits learn the components of a rifle or the intricacies of close order drill by the numbers, recruits to reading learn its mechanics sound by sound and word by word.

Gross, Jacquelyn

29.

Readers are plentiful: thinkers are rare.

Martineau, Harriet

30.

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

Pascal, Blaise

31.

Beware of the person of one book.

Aquinas, St. Thomas

32.

Who ever converses among old books will be hard to please among the new.

Temple, Sir William

33.

Those who do not read are no better off than those who cannot read.

34.

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

35.

Books are not absolutely dead things, but do contain a certain potency of life in them, to be as active as the soul whose progeny they are; they preserve, as in a vial, the purest efficacy and extraction of the living intellect that bred them.

Milton, John

36.

What is reading, but silent conversation.

Landor, Walter Savage

37.

The novel can't compete with cars, the movies, television, and liquor. A guy who's had a good feed and tanked up on good wine gives his old lady a kiss after supper and his day is over. Finished.

Celine, Louis-Ferdinand

38.

Some of the most famous books are the least worth reading. Their fame was due to their having done something that needed to be doing in their day. The work is done and the virtue of the book has expired.

Morely, John

39.

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.

40.

There is creative reading as well as creative writing.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

41.

Books are the blessed chloroform of the mind.

Chambers, Robert

42.

Old books that have ceased to be of service should no more be abandoned than should old friends who have ceased to give pleasure.

Worsthorne, Sir Peregrine

43.

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

44.

To sit alone in the lamplight with a book spread out before you hold intimate converse with men of unseen generations -- such is pleasure beyond compare.

Kenko, Yoshida

45.

The world may be full of fourth-rate writers but it's also full of fourth-rate readers.

Barstow, Stan

46.

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

Lichtenberg, Georg C.

47.

You will be the same person in five as you are today except for the people you meet and the books you read.

Jones, Charles ''Tremendous''

48.

Miss a meal if you have to, but don't miss a book.