Motivational Quotes

Books - reading

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.

Best Quotes about Books - reading

No matter how busy you may think you are, you must find time for reading, or surrender yourself to self-chosen ignorance.

Townsend, Atwood H.

We ought to reverence books; to look on them as useful and mighty things. If they are good and true, whether they are about religion, politics, farming, trade, law, or medicine, they are the message of Christ, the maker of all things -- the teacher of all truth.

Kingsley, Charles

As writers become more numerous, it is natural for readers to become more indolent; whence must necessarily arise a desire of attaining knowledge with the greatest possible ease.

Goldsmith, Oliver

Do we write books so that they shall merely be read? Don't we also write them for employment in the household? For one that is read from start to finish, thousands are leafed through, other thousands lie motionless, others are jammed against mouseholes, thrown at rats, others are stood on, sat on, drummed on, have gingerbread baked on them or are used to light pipes.

Lichtenberg, Georg C.

In science, read by preference the newest works. In literature, read the oldest. The classics are always modern.

Lytton, Lord Edward

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

Locke, John

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

Faulkner, William

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

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

Secondat, Charles de

10.

There are two kinds of books. Those that no one reads and those that no one ought to read.

Mencken, H. L.

11.

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

Descartes, Rene

12.

The greatest gift is the passion for reading. It is cheap, it consoles, it distracts, it excites, it gives you knowledge of the world and experience of a wide kind. It is a moral illumination.

Hardwick, Elizabeth

13.

Nine-tenths of the existing books are nonsense and the clever books are the refutation of that nonsense.

Disraeli, Benjamin

14.

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

15.

One half who graduate from college never read another book.

True, Herbert

16.

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

Tupper, Martin

17.

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

Forster, Edward M.

18.

Readers are plentiful: thinkers are rare.

Martineau, Harriet

19.

What we become depends on what we read after all the professors have finished with us. The greatest university of all is the collection of books.

Carlyle, Thomas

20.

Books and marriage go ill together.

Moliere

21.

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

22.

No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader.

Frost, Robert

23.

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

24.

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

Bevan, Aneurin

25.

If a book comes from the heart it will contrive to reach other hearts. All art and author craft are of small account to that.

Carlyle, Thomas

26.

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

27.

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.

28.

I know every book of mine by its smell, and I have but to put my nose between the pages to be reminded of all sorts of things.

Gissing, George Robert

29.

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

Jackson, Holbrook

30.

A novel is a mirror carried along a main road.

Stendhal, Henri B.

31.

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

32.

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.

33.

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

34.

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

Ruskin, John

35.

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

Murray, William

36.

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

37.

There is more treasure in books than in all the pirates loot on Treasure Island and best of all, you can enjoy these riches every day of your life.

Disney, Walt

38.

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

Butler, Samuel

39.

Hypocrite reader -- my fellow -- my brother!

Baudelaire, Charles

40.

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

Blackie, Professor

41.

Reading is to the mind what exercise is to the body. It is wholesome and bracing for the mind to have its faculties kept on the stretch.

Steele, Sir Richard

42.

This will never be a civilized country until we expend more money for books than we do for chewing gum.

Hubbard, Elbert

43.

My early and invincible love of reading I would not exchange for all the riches of India.

Gibbon, Edward

44.

I am a part of everything that I have read.

Kieran, John

45.

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

46.

When I am dead, I hope it may be said: His sins were scarlet, but his books were read.

Belloc, Hilaire

47.

A real book is not one that we read, but one that reads us.

Auden, W. H.

48.

All good books are alike in that they are truer than if they had really happened and after you are finished reading one you will feel that all that happened to you and afterwards it all belongs to you; the good and the bad, the ecstasy, the remorse, and sorrow, the people and the places and how the weather was.

Hemingway, Ernest

49.

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

Lichtenberg, Georg C.

50.

There is creative reading as well as creative writing.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo