Motivational Quotes

Books - reading

Much reading is an oppression of the mind, and extinguishes the natural candle, which is the reason of so many senseless scholars in the world.

- Penn, William

Best Quotes about Books - reading

Everything in the world exists to end up in a book.

Mallarme, Stephane

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

Camus, Albert

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

Until I feared I would lose it, I never loved to read. One does not love breathing.

Lee, Harper

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

The age of the book is almost gone.

Steiner, George

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

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

Lichtenberg, Georg C.

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

10.

Books succeed, and lives fail.

Browning, Elizabeth Barrett

11.

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

Voltaire

12.

A good title is the title of a successful book.

Chandler, Raymond

13.

Much reading is an oppression of the mind, and extinguishes the natural candle, which is the reason of so many senseless scholars in the world.

Penn, William

14.

The multitude of books is a great evil. There is no limit to this fever for writing.

Luther, Martin

15.

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

Morely, John

16.

A man ought to read just as his inclination leads him; for what he reads as a task will do him little good.

Johnson, Samuel

17.

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

18.

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

19.

I always like to look on the optimistic side of life, but I am realistic enough to know that life is a complex matter.

Disney, Walt

20.

Education... has produced a vast population able to read but unable to distinguish what is worth reading, an easy prey to sensations and cheap appeals.

Trevelyan, G. M.

21.

How can you dare teach a man to read until you've taught him everything else first?

Shaw, George Bernard

22.

The classics are only primitive literature. They belong to the same class as primitive machinery and primitive music and primitive medicine.

Leacock, Stephen B.

23.

A conventional good read is usually a bad read, a relaxing bath in what we know already. A true good read is surely an act of innovative creation in which we, the readers, become conspirators.

Bradbury, Malcolm

24.

Reading is a basic tool in the living of a good life.

Adler, Mortimer J.

25.

There is no robber worse than a bad book.

Proverb, Italian

26.

I read the newspaper avidly. It is my one form of continuous fiction.

Bevan, Aneurin

27.

A multitude of books distracts the mind.

Socrates

28.

I've never know any trouble than an hour's reading didn't assuage.

Secondat, Charles de

29.

What is reading, but silent conversation.

Landor, Walter Savage

30.

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

Harington, John

31.

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.

32.

Until it is kindled by a spirit as flamingly alive as the one which gave it birth a book is dead to us. Words divested of their magic are but dead hieroglyphs.

Miller, Henry

33.

One half who graduate from college never read another book.

True, Herbert

34.

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

Forster, Edward M.

35.

Fiction reveals truth that reality obscures.

West, Jessamyn

36.

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

Ruskin, John

37.

To learn to read is to light a fire; every syllable that is spelled out is a spark.

Hugo, Victor

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.

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

Whitman, Walt

40.

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

Parker, Dorothy

41.

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

42.

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

43.

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.

44.

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

45.

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

Ruskin, John

46.

Prerequisite for rereadability in books: that they be forgettable.

Rostand, Jean

47.

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

Dawkins, John

48.

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

Maclennan, Hugh

49.

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

50.

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