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

Readers are plentiful: thinkers are rare.

Martineau, Harriet

Don't just read the easy stuff. You may be entertained by it, but you will never grow from it.

Rohn, Jim

The last thing one discovers in composing a work is what to put first.

Pascal, Blaise

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

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

All the best stories in the world are but one story in reality -- the story of escape. It is the only thing which interests us all and at all times, how to escape.

Benson, Arthur Christopher

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

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

Who kills a man kills a reasonable creature, God's image, but thee who destroys a good book, kills reason itself.

Milton, John

10.

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

Brodsky, Joseph

11.

The failure to read good books both enfeebles the vision and strengthens our most fatal tendency --the belief that the here and now is all there is.

Bloom, Allan

12.

Miss a meal if you have to, but don't miss a book.

Rohn, Jim

13.

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

Dane, Frank

14.

A book that is shut is but a block.

Fuller, Thomas

15.

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

Blackie, Professor

16.

Books, books, books had found the secret of a garret-room piled high with cases in my father's name; Piled high, packed large, --where, creeping in and out among the giant fossils of my past, like some small nimble mouse between the ribs of a mastodon, I nibbled here and there at this or that box, pulling through the gap, in heats of terror, haste, victorious joy, the first book first. And how I felt it beat under my pillow, in the morning's dark. An hour before the sun would let me read! My books!

Browning, Elizabeth Barrett

17.

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

18.

What is a diary as a rule? A document useful to the person who keeps it. Dull to the contemporary who reads it and invaluable to the student, centuries afterwards, who treasures it.

Terry, Helen

19.

A book may be compared to your neighbor: if it be good, it cannot last too long; if bad, you cannot get rid of it too early.

Brooke, Rupert

20.

A good book, in the language of the book-sellers, is a salable one; in that of the curious, a scarce one; in that of men of sense, a useful and instructive one.

Chambers, Oswald

21.

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

Mencken, H. L.

22.

Book love... is your pass to the greatest, the purest, and the most perfect pleasure that God has prepared for His creatures.

Trollope, Anthony

23.

A wicked book cannot repent.

Proverb

24.

Books are not absolutely dead things, but do contain a certain potency of life in them, to be as active as the soul whose progeny they are; they preserve, as in a vial, the purest efficacy and extraction of the living intellect that bred them.

Milton, John

25.

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

26.

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

Butler, Samuel

27.

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

Gibbon, Edward

28.

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

Mallarme, Stephane

29.

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

30.

I divide all readers into two classes: those who read to remember and those who read to forget.

Phelps, William Lyon

31.

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

Hadas, Moses

32.

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

33.

Books, like friends, should be few and well chosen. Like friends, too, we should return to them again and again for, like true friends, they will never fail us -- never cease to instruct -- never cloy.

Colton, Charles Caleb

34.

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.

35.

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

36.

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

Belloc, Hilaire

37.

Old books, you know well, are books of the world's youth, and new books are the fruits of its age.

Holmes, Oliver Wendell

38.

Most books today seemed to have been written overnight from books read the day before.

Chamfort, Sebastien-Roch Nicolas De

39.

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

Millay, Edna St. Vincent

40.

Those who do not read are no better off than those who cannot read.

41.

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

Wycherley, William

42.

To buy books would be a good thing if we also could buy the time to read them.

Schopenhauer, Arthur

43.

What is reading, but silent conversation.

Landor, Walter Savage

44.

The unread story is not a story; it is little black marks on wood pulp. The reader, reading it, makes it live: a live thing, a story.

Guin, Ursula K. Le

45.

Books are not men and yet they stay alive.

Benet, Stephen Vincent

46.

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

47.

The successful Accelerated Reader is able to read larger than normal blocks or bites of the printed page with each eye stop. He has accepted, without reservation, the philosophy that the most important benefit of reading is the gaining of information, ideas, mental picture and entertainment-not the fretting over words. He has come to the realization that words in and of themselves are for the most part insignificant.

Cutler, Wade E.

48.

Our high respect for a well read person is praise enough for literature.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

49.

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

50.

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.