Motivational Quotes

Books - reading

What is reading, but silent conversation.

- Landor, Walter Savage

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

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

Voltaire

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

Byron, Lord

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

Shaw, George Bernard

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

Parker, Dorothy

Beware of the person of one book.

Aquinas, St. Thomas

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

Temple, Sir William

I wish I could write a beautiful book to break those hearts that are soon to cease to exist: a book of faith and small neat worlds and of people who live by the philosophies of popular songs.

No entertainment is so cheap as reading, nor is any pleasure so lasting.

Montagu, Lady Mary Wortley

10.

Books are the bees which carry the quickening pollen from one to another mind.

Lowell, James Russell

11.

Books are the blessed chloroform of the mind.

Chambers, Robert

12.

Ideally a book would have no order to it, and the reader would have to discover his own.

Vaneigem, Raoul

13.

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

14.

Only a generation of readers will span a generation of writers.

Spielberg, Steven

15.

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

Lawrence, D. H.

16.

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

Carlyle, Thomas

17.

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

18.

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

19.

Reading is a basic tool in the living of a good life.

Adler, Mortimer J.

20.

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

Barstow, Stan

21.

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

22.

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

23.

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

24.

You are wise, witty and wonderful, but you spend too much time reading this sort of stuff.

Critchfield, Jim

25.

There is no such thing as a moral book or an immoral book. Books are well written or badly written. That is all.

Wilde, Oscar

26.

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

Lichtenberg, Georg C.

27.

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

Rohn, Jim

28.

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

29.

A bibliophile of little means is likely to suffer often. Books don't slip from his hands but fly past him through the air, high as birds, high as prices.

Neruda, Pablo

30.

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

Murray, William

31.

To feel most beautifully alive means to be reading something beautiful, ready always to apprehend in the flow of language the sudden flash of poetry.

Bachelard, Gaston

32.

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.

33.

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.

34.

Every abridgement of a good book is a fool abridged.

Montaigne, Michel Eyquem De

35.

An empty book is like an infant's soul, in which anything may be written. It is capable of all things, but containeth nothing. I have a mind to fill this with profitable wonders.

Traherne, Thomas

36.

I am a part of everything that I have read.

Kieran, John

37.

Reading furnishes the mind only with material for knowledge; it is thinking that makes what we read ours.

Locke, John

38.

There is no robber worse than a bad book.

Proverb, Italian

39.

I know every book of mine by its smell, and I have but to put my nose between the pages to be reminded of all sorts of things.

Gissing, George Robert

40.

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

Mcluhan, Marshall

41.

No matter how busy you may think you are, you must find time for reading, or surrender yourself to self-chosen ignorance.

Townsend, Atwood H.

42.

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

43.

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

44.

Everything in this book may be wrong. [The Savior's Manual]

Bach, Richard

45.

I can't bear art that you can walk round and admire. A book should be either a bandit or a rebel or a man in the crowd.

Lawrence, D. H.

46.

Tradition is but a meteor, which, if it once falls, cannot be rekindled. Memory, once interrupted, is not to be recalled. But written learning is a fixed luminary, which, after the cloud that had hidden it has passed away, is again bright in its proper station. So books are faithful repositories, which may be awhile neglected or forgotten, but when opened again, will again impart instruction.

Johnson

47.

Books are not men and yet they stay alive.

Benet, Stephen Vincent

48.

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

Chappell, Warren

49.

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

Byron, Lord

50.

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