Motivational Quotes

Books - reading

A library is thought in cold storage.

- Samuel, Herbert

Best Quotes about Books - reading

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

When you have mastered numbers, you will in fact no longer be reading numbers, any more than you read words when reading books You will be reading meanings.

Geneen, Harold S.

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

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

Sandwell, B. K.

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

Prerequisite for rereadability in books: that they be forgettable.

Rostand, Jean

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

Every abridgement of a good book is a fool abridged.

Montaigne, Michel Eyquem De

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.

A book is a part of life, a manifestation of life, just as much as a tree or a horse or a star. It obeys its own rhythms, its own laws, whether it be a novel, a play, or a diary. The deep, hidden rhythm of life is always there -- that of the pulse, the heart beat.

Miller, Henry

11.

The great American novel has not only already been written, it has already been rejected.

Dane, Frank

12.

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

13.

A person who publishes a book appears willfully in public with his pants down.

Millay, Edna St. Vincent

14.

The books one has written in the past have two surprises in store: one couldn't write them again, and wouldn't want to.

Rostand, Jean

15.

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

16.

I love to lose myself in other men's minds. When I am not walking, I am reading. I cannot sit and think; books think for me.

Lamb, Charles

17.

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

18.

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

Fuller, Margaret

19.

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

Hugo, Victor

20.

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

21.

Everywhere I have sought rest and not found it, except sitting in a corner by myself with a little book.

Kempis, Thomas

22.

The pleasure of reading is doubled when one lives with another who shares the same books.

Mansfield, Katherine

23.

Beware you be not swallowed up in books! An ounce of love is worth a pound of knowledge.

Wesley, John

24.

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

Jackson, Holbrook

25.

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

26.

The books one reads in childhood, and perhaps most of all the bad and good bad books, create in one's mind a sort of false map of the world, a series of fabulous countries into which one can retreat at odd moments throughout the rest of life, and which in some cases can survive a visit to the real countries which they are supposed to represent.

Orwell, George

27.

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

28.

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

Rohn, Jim

29.

A novel is a mirror carried along a main road.

Stendhal, Henri B.

30.

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

Murray, William

31.

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

32.

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

33.

In the dark colony of night, when I consider man's magnificent capacity for malice, madness, folly, envy, rage, and destructiveness, and I wonder whether we shall not end up as breakfast for newts and polyps, I seem to hear the muffled cries of all the words in all the books with covers closed.

Rosten, Leo

34.

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

Joubert, Joseph

35.

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

Temple, Sir William

36.

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

Lytton, Lord Edward

37.

One half who graduate from college never read another book.

True, Herbert

38.

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

Hubbard, Elbert

39.

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

40.

A successful book cannot afford to be more than ten percent new.

Mcluhan, Marshall

41.

The book to read is not the one which thinks for you, but the one which makes you think. No book in the world equals the Bible for that.

Mccosh

42.

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

43.

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

Lichtenberg, Georg C.

44.

Books are men of higher stature; the only men that speak aloud for future times to hear.

Barrett, E.S.

45.

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

46.

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

47.

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.

48.

A bad book is the worse that it cannot repent. It has not been the devil's policy to keep the masses of mankind in ignorance; but finding that they will read, he is doing all in his power to poison their books.

Kirk, E.N.

49.

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

Maugham, W. Somerset

50.

The books that the world calls immoral are the books that show the world its own shame.

Wilde, Oscar