Motivational Quotes

Books - reading

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.

Best Quotes about Books - reading

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

Every abridgement of a good book is a fool abridged.

Montaigne, Michel Eyquem De

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

The only books that influence us are those for which we are ready, and which have gone a little farther down our particular path than we have yet got ourselves.

Forster, Edward M.

The real risks for any artist are taken in pushing the work to the limits of what is possible, in the attempt to increase the sum of what it is possible to think. Books become good when they go to this edge and risk falling over it --when they endanger the artist by reason of what he has, or has not, artistically dared.

Rushdie, Salman

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

Camus, Albert

I am a part of everything that I have read.

Kieran, John

He has only half learned the art of reading who has not added to it the more refined art of skipping and skimming.

Balfour, Arthur James

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

10.

Footnotes are the finer-suckered surfaces that allow testicular paragraphs to hold fast to the wider reality of the library.

Baker, Nicholson

11.

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

12.

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

13.

A good book, in the language of the book-sellers, is a salable one; in that of the curious, a scarce one; in that of men of sense, a useful and instructive one.

Chambers, Oswald

14.

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

Harington, John

15.

Books are divided into two classes, the books of the hour and the books of all time.

Ruskin, John

16.

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

Spielberg, Steven

17.

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

Critchfield, Jim

18.

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''

19.

To read too many books is harmful.

Zedong, Mao

20.

Read good, big important things.

Noonan, Peggy

21.

He had read much, if one considers his long life; but his contemplation was much more than his reading. He was wont to say that if he had read as much as other men he should have known no more than other men.

Aubrey, John

22.

Reading makes immigrants of us all. It takes us away from home, but more important, it finds homes for us everywhere.

Rochman, Hazel

23.

Books, like friends, should be few and well chosen. Like friends, too, we should return to them again and again for, like true friends, they will never fail us -- never cease to instruct -- never cloy.

Colton, Charles Caleb

24.

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

Lawrence, D. H.

25.

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

26.

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

Schopenhauer, Arthur

27.

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.

28.

The reason that fiction is more interesting than any other form of literature, to those who really like to study people, is that in fiction the author can really tell the truth without humiliating himself.

Roosevelt, Eleanor

29.

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

Barstow, Stan

30.

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

31.

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

Mencken, H. L.

32.

I am not a speed reader. I am a speed understander.

Asimov, Isaac

33.

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

Joubert, Joseph

34.

You will find most books worth reading are worth reading twice.

Morely, John

35.

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

36.

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

37.

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

Carlyle, Thomas

38.

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

Lichtenberg, Georg C.

39.

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

Auden, W. H.

40.

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

Channing, William Ellery

41.

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

42.

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.

43.

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

Forster, Edward M.

44.

In the dark colony of night, when I consider man's magnificent capacity for malice, madness, folly, envy, rage, and destructiveness, and I wonder whether we shall not end up as breakfast for newts and polyps, I seem to hear the muffled cries of all the words in all the books with covers closed.

Rosten, Leo

45.

Prerequisite for rereadability in books: that they be forgettable.

Rostand, Jean

46.

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

Phelps, William Lyon

47.

Fiction reveals truth that reality obscures.

West, Jessamyn

48.

There is no robber worse than a bad book.