Motivational Quotes

Books - reading

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

- Sandwell, B. K.

Best Quotes about Books - reading

No man understands a deep book until he has seen and lived at least part of its contents.

Pound, Ezra

It does not follow because many books are written by persons born in America that there exists an American literature. Books which imitate or represent the thoughts and life of Europe do not constitute an American literature. Before such can exist, an original idea must animate this nation and fresh currents of life must call into life fresh thoughts along the shore.

Fuller, Margaret

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

Lichtenberg, Georg C.

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

Vaneigem, Raoul

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

Gibbon, Edward

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

Books are not men and yet they stay alive.

Benet, Stephen Vincent

Does there, I wonder, exist a being who has read all, or approximately all, that the person of average culture is supposed to have read, and that not to have read is a social sin? If such a being does exist, surely he is an old, a very old man.

Bennett, Arnold

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.

10.

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.

11.

The newest books are those that never grow old.

Jackson, George Holbrook

12.

It is from books that wise people derive consolation in the troubles of life.

Hugo, Victor

13.

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

14.

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

15.

There is no such thing as a moral book or an immoral book. Books are well written or badly written. That is all.

Wilde, Oscar

16.

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

17.

No entertainment is so cheap as reading, nor is any pleasure so lasting.

Montagu, Lady Mary Wortley

18.

Beware of the person of one book.

Aquinas, St. Thomas

19.

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

20.

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

Maugham, W. Somerset

21.

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

Disraeli, Benjamin

22.

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

Shaw, George Bernard

23.

You will be the same person in five as you are today except for the people you meet and the books you read.

Jones, Charles ''Tremendous''

24.

Begin to read a book that will help you move toward your dream.

Brown, Les

25.

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

Hope, Anthony

26.

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

27.

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

28.

The best effect of any book, is that it excites the reader to self-activity.

Carlyle, Thomas

29.

Then I though of reading -- the nice and subtle happiness of reading ... this joy not dulled by age, this polite and unpunishable vice, this selfish, serene, lifelong intoxication.

Smith, Logan Pearsall

30.

There are worse crimes than burning books. One of them is not reading them.

Brodsky, Joseph

31.

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

32.

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

Kempis, Thomas

33.

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

34.

Books are the blessed chloroform of the mind.

Chambers, Robert

35.

Thank you for sending me a copy of your book -- I'll waste no time reading it.

Hadas, Moses

36.

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.

37.

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

Harington, John

38.

Books and marriage go ill together.

Moliere

39.

When you reread a classic, you do not see more in the book than you did before; you see more in you than there was before.

Fadiman, Clifton

40.

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

Hugo, Victor

41.

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

Lee, Harper

42.

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

43.

Everything in this book may be wrong. [The Savior's Manual]

Bach, Richard

44.

We should be as careful of the books we read, as of the company we keep. The dead very often have more power than the living.

Edwards, Tryon

45.

The good parts of a book may be only something a writer is lucky enough to overhear or it may be the wreck of his whole damn life --and one is as good as the other.

Hemingway, Ernest

46.

Surviving and thriving as a professional today demands two new approaches to the written word. First, it requires a new approach to orchestrating information, by skillfully choosing what to read and what to ignore. Second, it requires a new approach to integrating information, by reading faster and with greater comprehension.

Calano, Jimmy

47.

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

Wilde, Oscar

48.

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

49.

The mortality of all inanimate things is terrible to me, but that of books most of all.

Howells, William Dean

50.

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