Motivational Quotes

Books - reading

Books to judicious compilers, are useful; to particular arts and professions, they are absolutely necessary; to men of real science, they are tools: but more are tools to them.

- Johnson

Best Quotes about Books - reading

Next, in importance to books are their titles.

Davies, Paul

One half who graduate from college never read another book.

True, Herbert

Reading is to the mind what exercise is to the body. It is wholesome and bracing for the mind to have its faculties kept on the stretch.

Steele, Sir Richard

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

You've really got to start hitting the books because it's no joke out here.

Lee, Spike

Many books require no thought from those who read them, and for a very simple reason: they made no such demand upon those who wrote them. Those works, therefore, are the most valuable, that set our thinking faculties in the fullest operation. understand them.

Clarendon

Books are not men and yet they stay alive.

Benet, Stephen Vincent

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

Mcluhan, Marshall

When I get a little money, I buy books; and if any is left I buy food and clothes.

Erasmus, Desiderius

10.

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

Wilde, Oscar

11.

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

12.

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

Byron, Lord

13.

A novel must be exceptionally good to live as long as the average cat.

Maclennan, Hugh

14.

Books are men of higher stature; the only men that speak aloud for future times to hear.

Barrett, E.S.

15.

We are too civil to books. For a few golden sentences we will turn over and actually read a volume of four or five hundred pages.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

16.

When you reread a classic, you do not see more in the book than you did before; you see more in you than there was before.

Fadiman, Clifton

17.

I always begin at the left with the opening word of the sentence and read toward the right and I recommend this method.

Thurber, James

18.

There is creative reading as well as creative writing.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

19.

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

Lichtenberg, Georg C.

20.

The newest books are those that never grow old.

Jackson, George Holbrook

21.

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.

22.

Until it is kindled by a spirit as flamingly alive as the one which gave it birth a book is dead to us. Words divested of their magic are but dead hieroglyphs.

Miller, Henry

23.

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

Byron, Lord

24.

From the moment I picked your book up until I laid it down I was convulsed with laughter. Some day I intend reading it.

Marx, Groucho

25.

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

26.

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

Schopenhauer, Arthur

27.

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

28.

Education... has produced a vast population able to read but unable to distinguish what is worth reading, an easy prey to sensations and cheap appeals.

Trevelyan, G. M.

29.

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

Mencken, H. L.

30.

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

Parker, Dorothy

31.

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.

32.

I always like to look on the optimistic side of life, but I am realistic enough to know that life is a complex matter.

Disney, Walt

33.

The best effect of any book, is that it excites the reader to self-activity.

Carlyle, Thomas

34.

A man ought to read just as his inclination leads him; for what he reads as a task will do him little good.

Johnson, Samuel

35.

The oldest books are still only just out to those who have not read them.

Butler, Samuel

36.

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

37.

Books succeed, and lives fail.

Browning, Elizabeth Barrett

38.

No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader.

Frost, Robert

39.

Fiction reveals truth that reality obscures.

West, Jessamyn

40.

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

41.

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

42.

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

43.

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.

44.

I am a part of everything that I have read.

Kieran, John

45.

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

46.

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

Schopenhauer, Arthur

47.

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

Forster, Edward M.

48.

Once we have learned to read, meaning of words can somehow register without consciousness.

Marcel, Anthony

49.

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