Motivational Quotes

Books - reading

I would sooner read a timetable or a catalog than nothing at all.

- Maugham, W. Somerset

Best Quotes about Books - reading

Read as you taste fruit or savor wine, or enjoy friendship, love or life.

Jackson, Holbrook

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

Coolio

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

Morely, John

We should be as careful of the books we read, as of the company we keep. The dead very often have more power than the living.

Edwards, Tryon

The book you don't read won't help.

Rohn, Jim

Some of the most famous books are the least worth reading. Their fame was due to their having done something that needed to be doing in their day. The work is done and the virtue of the book has expired.

Morely, John

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

Critchfield, Jim

You will, I am sure, agree with me that... if page 534 only finds us in the second chapter, the length of the first one must have been really intolerable.

Doyle, Sir Arthur Conan

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

10.

Books had instant replay long before televised sports.

Williams, Bert

11.

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

Lichtenberg, Georg C.

12.

Everything you need for better future and success has already been written. And guess what? All you have to do is go to the library.

Rohn, Jim

13.

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

14.

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

15.

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

Forster, Edward M.

16.

The man who does not read books has no advantage over the man that can not read them.

Twain, Mark

17.

Beware of the person of one book.

Aquinas, St. Thomas

18.

To read well, that is, to read true books in a true spirit, is a noble exercise, and one that will task the reader more than any other exercise which the customs of the day esteem. It requires a training such as the athletes underwent, the steady intention almost of the whole life to this object.

Thoreau, Henry David

19.

The newest books are those that never grow old.

Jackson, George Holbrook

20.

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

21.

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

22.

Five daily newspapers arrive in my California driveway. The New York times and the Wall Street Journal are supplemented by three local papers. As for magazines, I read, or at least skim, Business Week, Forbes, The Economist, INC; Industry Week, Fortune. Other subscriptions include Sales and Marketing Management, Modern Health Care, Progressive Grocer, High Tech Business, and Slaon Management Review from MIT. I religiously read Business Tokyo, Asia Week, and Far Eastern Economic Review. I glance at Newsweek and Time ... but I devour the New Republic, Policy Review, Foreign Affairs, The Washington Monthly, and Public Interest. How about books? A dozen or more each month.

Peters, Thomas J.

23.

Thy books should, like thy friends, not many be, yet such wherein men may thy judgment see.

Wycherley, William

24.

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

Joubert, Joseph

25.

My books are water; those of the great geniuses are wine -- everybody drinks water.

Twain, Mark

26.

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

27.

There is no robber worse than a bad book.

Proverb, Italian

28.

You can either read something many times in order to be assured that you got it all, or else you can define your purpose and use techniques which will assure that you have met it and gotten what you need.

Kump, Peter

29.

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

Porter, Noah

30.

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

Ruskin, John

31.

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

32.

Begin to read a book that will help you move toward your dream.

Brown, Les

33.

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

Lee, Spike

34.

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

Barstow, Stan

35.

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

Lichtenberg, Georg C.

36.

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

Schopenhauer, Arthur

37.

Books are not absolutely dead things, but do contain a certain potency of life in them, to be as active as the soul whose progeny they are; they preserve, as in a vial, the purest efficacy and extraction of the living intellect that bred them.

Milton, John

38.

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

Temple, Sir William

39.

Does there, I wonder, exist a being who has read all, or approximately all, that the person of average culture is supposed to have read, and that not to have read is a social sin? If such a being does exist, surely he is an old, a very old man.

Bennett, Arnold

40.

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

Butler, Samuel

41.

What is a diary as a rule? A document useful to the person who keeps it. Dull to the contemporary who reads it and invaluable to the student, centuries afterwards, who treasures it.

Terry, Helen

42.

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

43.

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

44.

A wicked book cannot repent.

Proverb

45.

There are people who read too much: bibliobibuli. I know some who are constantly drunk on books, as other men are drunk on whiskey or religion. They wander through this most diverting and stimulating of worlds in a haze, seeing nothing and hearing nothing.

Mencken, H. L.

46.

Don't just read the easy stuff. You may be entertained by it, but you will never grow from it.

Rohn, Jim

47.

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

Parker, Dorothy

48.

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

Chappell, Warren

49.

Today a reader, tomorrow a leader.

Fusselman, W.

50.

Reading a book is like re-writing it for yourself. You bring to a novel, anything you read, all your experience of the world. You bring your history and you read it in your own terms.

Carter, Angela