Motivational Quotes

Books - reading

There is no robber worse than a bad book.

- Proverb, Italian

Best Quotes about Books - reading

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

Ruskin, John

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

Shaw, George Bernard

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

Twain, Mark

A person of mature years and ripe development, who is expecting nothing from literature but the corroboration and renewal of past ideas, may find satisfaction in a lucidity so complete as to occasion no imaginative excitement, but young and ambitious students are not content with it. They seek the excitement because they are capable of the growth that it accompanies.

Cooley, Charles Horton

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

Any book that helps a child to form a habit of reading, to make reading one of his deep and continuing needs, is good for him.

McKenna, Richard

I always begin at the left with the opening word of the sentence and read toward the right and I recommend this method.

Thurber, James

A bad book is as much of a labor to write as a good one; it comes as sincerely from the author's soul.

Huxley, Aldous

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

Wycherley, William

10.

A dose of poison can do its work but once. A bad book can go on poisoning minds for generations.

Murray, William

11.

I am a part of everything that I have read.

Kieran, John

12.

After all manner of professors have done their best for us, the place we are to get knowledge is in books. The true university of these days is a collection of books.

Carlyle, Thomas

13.

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

14.

Every abridgement of a good book is a fool abridged.

Montaigne, Michel Eyquem De

15.

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.

16.

The most foolish kind of a book is a kind of leaky boat on the sea of wisdom; some of the wisdom will get in anyhow.

Holmes, Oliver Wendell

17.

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

18.

What gunpowder did for war the printing press has done for the mind.

Phillips, Wendell

19.

The newest books are those that never grow old.

Jackson, George Holbrook

20.

A house is not a home unless it contains food and fire for the mind as well as the body.

Fuller, Margaret

21.

The tools I need for my work are paper, tobacco, food, and a little whiskey.

Faulkner, William

22.

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

Schopenhauer, Arthur

23.

The printing press is either the greatest blessing or the greatest curse of modern times, sometimes one forgets which it is.

Barrie, Sir James M.

24.

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

Johnson, Samuel

25.

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

Lichtenberg, Georg C.

26.

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

Lichtenberg, Georg C.

27.

Hypocrite reader -- my fellow -- my brother!

Baudelaire, Charles

28.

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

29.

Without books the development of civilization would have been impossible. They are the engines of change, windows on the world, Lighthouses as the poet said erected in the sea of time. They are companions, teachers, magicians, bankers of the treasures of the mind, Books are humanity in print.

Schopenhauer, Arthur

30.

Once we have learned to read, meaning of words can somehow register without consciousness.

Marcel, Anthony

31.

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

32.

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

33.

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

Spielberg, Steven

34.

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

Byron, Lord

35.

The books that everybody admires are those that nobody reads.

France, Anatole

36.

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

Baker, Nicholson

37.

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

38.

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.

39.

A multitude of books distracts the mind.

Socrates

40.

I feel a kind of reverence for the first books of young authors. There is so much aspiration in them, so much audacious hope and trembling fear, so much of the heart's history, that all errors and shortcomings are for a while lost sight of in the amiable self assertion of youth.

Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth

41.

Very young children eat their books, literally devouring their contents. This is one reason for the scarcity of first editions of Alice in Wonderland and other favorites of the nursery.

Rosenbach, A. S. W.

42.

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

43.

To feel most beautifully alive means to be reading something beautiful, ready always to apprehend in the flow of language the sudden flash of poetry.

Bachelard, Gaston

44.

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

Whitman, Walt

45.

Read nothing that you do not care to remember, and remember nothing you do not mean to use.