Motivational Quotes

Books - reading

The constant habit of perusing devout books is so indispensable, that it has been termed the oil of the lamp of prayer. Too much reading, however, and too little meditation, may produce the effect of a lamp inverted; which is extinguished by the very excess of that ailment, whose property is to feed it.

- More, Hannah

Best Quotes about Books - reading

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

Temple, Sir William

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

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

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.

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

Byron, Lord

With one day's reading a man may have the key in his hands.

Pound, Ezra

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

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

Sandwell, B. K.

A library is thought in cold storage.

Samuel, Herbert

10.

Read good, big important things.

Noonan, Peggy

11.

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

Chamfort, Sebastien-Roch Nicolas De

12.

Beware of the person of one book.

Aquinas, St. Thomas

13.

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

14.

You should read books like you take medicine, by advice, and not by advertisement.

Ruskin, John

15.

Readers are less and less seen as mere non-writers, the subhuman other or flawed derivative of the author; the lack of a pen is no longer a shameful mark of secondary status but a positively enabling space, just as within every writer can be seen to lurk, as a repressed but contaminating antithesis, a reader.

Eagleton, Terry

16.

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

17.

If I had my way books would not be written in English, but in an exceedingly difficult secret language that only skilled professional readers and story-tellers could interpret. Then people like you would have to go to public halls and pay good prices to hear the professionals decode and read the books aloud for you. This plan would have the advantage of scaring off all amateur authors, retired politicians, country doctors and I-Married-a-Midget writers who would not have the patience to learn the secret language.

Davies, Robertson

18.

Somewhere, everywhere, now hidden, now apparent in what ever is written down, is the form of a human being. If we seek to know him, are we idly occupied?

Woolf, Virginia

19.

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

20.

Hypocrite reader -- my fellow -- my brother!

Baudelaire, Charles

21.

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

Schopenhauer, Arthur

22.

Happy is he who has laid up in his youth, and held fast in all fortune, a genuine and passionate love for reading.

Choate, Rufus

23.

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

24.

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

Byron, Lord

25.

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

Voltaire

26.

The good of a book lies in its being read. A book is made up of signs that speak of other signs, which in their turn speak of things. Without an eye to read them, a book contains signs that produce no concepts; therefore it is dumb.

Eco, Umberto

27.

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

28.

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

29.

The reason a writer writes a book is to forget a book and the reason a reader reads one is to remember it.

Wolfe, Thomas

30.

Books are but waste paper unless we spend in action the wisdom we get from thought -- asleep. When we are weary of the living, we may repair to the dead, who have nothing of peevishness, pride, or design in their conversation.

Collier, Jeremy

31.

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

Rochman, Hazel

32.

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

Chesterton, Gilbert K.

33.

The words of my book nothing, the drift of it everything.

Whitman, Walt

34.

Some books leave us free and some books make us free.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

35.

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

Twain, Mark

36.

A book might be written on the injustice of the just.

Hope, Anthony

37.

Books are those faithful mirrors that reflect to our mind the minds of sages and heroes.

Gibbon, Edward

38.

A wicked book cannot repent.

Proverb

39.

Books are lighthouses erected in the great sea of time.

Whipple, Edwin P.

40.

Next to acquiring good friends, the best acquisition is that of good books.

Colton, Charles Caleb

41.

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

42.

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

43.

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

Vaneigem, Raoul

44.

People are much more willing to lend you books than bookcases.

Twain, Mark

45.

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

46.

Books had instant replay long before televised sports.

Williams, Bert

47.

Reading the Scriptures is an uplifting experience.

48.

No story is the same to us after a lapse of time; or rather we who read it are no longer the same interpreters.

Eliot, George

49.

One half who graduate from college never read another book.

True, Herbert