Motivational Quotes

Books - reading

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

- Lee, Spike

Best Quotes about Books - reading

A multitude of books distracts the mind.

Socrates

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

Books are the best of things if well used; if abused, among the worst. They are good for nothing but to inspire. I had better never see a book than be warped by its attraction clean out of my own orbit, and made a satellite instead of a system.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

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

The books one has written in the past have two surprises in store: one couldn't write them again, and wouldn't want to.

Rostand, Jean

Books and marriage go ill together.

Moliere

The failure to read good books both enfeebles the vision and strengthens our most fatal tendency --the belief that the here and now is all there is.

Bloom, Allan

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

Chesterton, Gilbert K.

10.

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

11.

I divide all readers into two classes: those who read to remember and those who read to forget.

Phelps, William Lyon

12.

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

13.

Digressions, incontestably, are the sunshine; they are the life, the soul of reading! Take them out of this book, for instance, --you might as well take the book along with them; --one cold external winter would reign in every page of it; restore them to the writer; --he steps forth like a bridegroom, --bids All-hail; brings in variety, and forbids the appetite to fail.

Sterne, Laurence

14.

Every man is a volume if you know how to read him.

Channing, William Ellery

15.

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

Porter, Noah

16.

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

Lichtenberg, Georg C.

17.

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

18.

The newest books are those that never grow old.

Jackson, George Holbrook

19.

Old books, you know well, are books of the world's youth, and new books are the fruits of its age.

Holmes, Oliver Wendell

20.

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

Murray, William

21.

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

22.

The Brahmins say that in their books there are many predictions of times in which it will rain. But press those books as strongly as you can, you can not get out of them a drop of water. So you can not get out of all the books that contain the best precepts the smallest good deed.

Tolstoy, Count Leo

23.

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

24.

A book that is shut is but a block.

Fuller, Thomas

25.

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

Byron, Lord

26.

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

27.

Early in the morning, at break of day, in all the freshness and dawn of one's strength, to read a book --I call that vicious!

Nietzsche, Friedrich

28.

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

29.

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

Schopenhauer, Arthur

30.

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

31.

The power of a text is different when it is read from when it is copied out. Only the copied text thus commands the soul of him who is occupied with it, whereas the mere reader never discovers the new aspects of his inner self that are opened by the text, that road cut through the interior jungle forever closing behind it: because the reader follows the movement of his mind in the free flight of day-dreaming, whereas the copier submits it to command.

Benjamin, Walter

32.

I feel like I'm drowning. Every night, I'm carrying home loads of things to read but I'm too exhausted. I keep clipping things and Xeroxing them and planning to read them eventually, but I just end up throwing it all away and feeling guilty.

Levine, Ghita

33.

A library is thought in cold storage.

Samuel, Herbert

34.

I am a part of everything that I have read.

Kieran, John

35.

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

Mencken, H. L.

36.

When a book raises your spirit, and inspires you with noble and manly thoughts, seek for no other test of its excellence. It is good, and made by a good workman.

Bruyere, Jean De La

37.

This is not a book. This is libel, slander, defamation of character. This is not a book, in the ordinary sense of the word. No, this is a prolonged insult, a gob of spit in the face of Art, a kick in the pants to God, Man, Destiny, Time, Love, Beauty... what you will. I am going to sing for you, a little off key perhaps, but I will sing.

Miller, Henry

38.

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

Camus, Albert

39.

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

Hood, Thomas

40.

Prerequisite for rereadability in books: that they be forgettable.

Rostand, Jean

41.

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

Wilde, Oscar

42.

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

43.

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

Blackie, Professor

44.

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

Proverb, American

45.

The books that everybody admires are those that nobody reads.

France, Anatole

46.

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

Maclennan, Hugh

47.

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

Lee, Spike

48.

Most books, like their authors, are born to die; of only a few books can it be said that death has no dominion over them; they live, and their influence lives forever.

Swartz, J.

49.

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

Hadas, Moses

50.

This will never be a civilized country until we expend more money for books than we do for chewing gum.

Hubbard, Elbert