Motivational Quotes

Books - reading

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

- Maclennan, Hugh

Best Quotes about Books - reading

Read good, big important things.

Noonan, Peggy

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

All my good reading, you might say, was done in the toilet. There are passages in Ulysses which can be read only in the toilet -- if one wants to extract the full flavor of their content.

Miller, Henry

A good book is the best of friends, the same today and for ever.

Tupper, Martin

The reading of all good books is like a conversation with all the finest men of past centuries.

Descartes, Rene

Books are standing counselors and preachers, always at hand, and always disinterested; having this advantage over oral instructors, that they are ready to repeat their lesson as often as we please.

Chambers, Oswald

Except a living man there is nothing more wonderful than a book! a message to us from the dead -- from human souls we never saw, who lived, perhaps, thousands of miles away. And yet these, in those little sheets of paper, speak to us, arouse us, terrify us, teach us, comfort us, open their hearts to us as brothers.

Kingsley, Charles

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

Locke, John

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

10.

Books are the blessed chloroform of the mind.

Chambers, Robert

11.

Books that you carry to the fire, and hold readily in your hand, are most useful after all.

Johnson, Samuel

12.

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

Proverb, American

13.

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

14.

The things I want to know are in books; my best friend is the man who'll get me a book I ain't read.

Lincoln, Abraham

15.

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

16.

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

Barstow, Stan

17.

For a good book has this quality, that it is not merely a petrifaction of its author, but that once it has been tossed behind, like Deucalion's little stone, it acquires a separate and vivid life of its own.

Lejeune, Caroline

18.

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

19.

The pleasure of reading is doubled when one lives with another who shares the same books.

Mansfield, Katherine

20.

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

Hadas, Moses

21.

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

Byron, Lord

22.

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

23.

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

Lichtenberg, Georg C.

24.

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

25.

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

26.

It is books that teach us to refine our pleasures when young, and to recall them with satisfaction when we are old.

Hunt, Leigh

27.

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

28.

Most books today seemed to have been written overnight from books read the day before.

Chamfort, Sebastien-Roch Nicolas De

29.

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

30.

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

Maclennan, Hugh

31.

Books succeed, and lives fail.

Browning, Elizabeth Barrett

32.

Book love... is your pass to the greatest, the purest, and the most perfect pleasure that God has prepared for His creatures.

Trollope, Anthony

33.

I am what libraries and librarians have made me, with little assistance from a professor of Greek and poets.

Sandwell, B. K.

34.

The mortality of all inanimate things is terrible to me, but that of books most of all.

Howells, William Dean

35.

All the best stories in the world are but one story in reality -- the story of escape. It is the only thing which interests us all and at all times, how to escape.

Benson, Arthur Christopher

36.

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

37.

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

38.

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

Chappell, Warren

39.

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

40.

The lessons taught in great books are misleading. The commerce in life is rarely so simple and never so just.

Brookner, Anita

41.

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

42.

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

Erasmus, Desiderius

43.

I don't think any good book is based on factual experience. Bad books are about things the writer already knew before he wrote them.

Fuentes, Carlos

44.

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

Schopenhauer, Arthur

45.

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

Dawkins, John

46.

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

Rohn, Jim

47.

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

48.

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

Baker, Nicholson

49.

The books we think we ought to read are poky, dull, and dry; The books that we would like to read we are ashamed to buy; The books that people talk about we never can recall; And the books that people give us, oh, they're the worst of all.

Wells, Carolyn

50.

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

Lichtenberg, Georg C.