Motivational Quotes

Books - reading

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

Best Quotes about Books - reading

Many books require no thought from those who read them, and for a very simple reason: they made no such demand upon those who wrote them. Those works, therefore, are the most valuable, that set our thinking faculties in the fullest operation. understand them.

Clarendon

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

A great book should leave you with many experiences and slightly exhausted at the end. You should live several lives while reading it.

Styron, William

Books are those faithful mirrors that reflect to our mind the minds of sages and heroes.

Gibbon, Edward

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

The reason that fiction is more interesting than any other form of literature, to those who really like to study people, is that in fiction the author can really tell the truth without humiliating himself.

Roosevelt, Eleanor

My books are water; those of the great geniuses are wine -- everybody drinks water.

Twain, Mark

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

Schopenhauer, Arthur

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

10.

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

Tupper, Martin

11.

Books are the bees which carry the quickening pollen from one to another mind.

Lowell, James Russell

12.

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.

13.

'Tis the good reader that makes the good book; in every book he finds passages which seem to be confidences or sides hidden from all else and unmistakably meant for his ear; the profit of books is according to the sensibility of the reader; the profound thought or passion sleeps as in a mine, until it is discovered by an equal mind and heart.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

14.

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

15.

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

16.

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

17.

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

Gibbon, Edward

18.

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

Holmes, Oliver Wendell

19.

If a secret history of books could be written, and the author's private thoughts and meanings noted down alongside of his story, how many insipid volumes would become interesting, and dull tales excite the reader!

Thackeray, William M.

20.

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

Wesley, John

21.

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

Phelps, William Lyon

22.

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

Twain, Mark

23.

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

Harington, John

24.

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

25.

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

26.

Here, my dear Lucy, hide these books. Quick, quick! Fling Peregrine Pickle under the toilette --throw Roderick Random into the closet --put The Innocent Adultery into The Whole Duty of Man; thrust Lord Aimworth under the sofa! cram Ovid behind the bolster; there --put The Man of Feeling into your pocket. Now for them.

Sheridan, Richard Brinsley

27.

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

Belloc, Hilaire

28.

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

Montagu, Lady Mary Wortley

29.

A novel is never anything, but a philosophy put into images.

Camus, Albert

30.

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

Pascal, Blaise

31.

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

Rohn, Jim

32.

If I had my way books would not be written in English, but in an exceedingly difficult secret language that only skilled professional readers and story-tellers could interpret. Then people like you would have to go to public halls and pay good prices to hear the professionals decode and read the books aloud for you. This plan would have the advantage of scaring off all amateur authors, retired politicians, country doctors and I-Married-a-Midget writers who would not have the patience to learn the secret language.

Davies, Robertson

33.

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

34.

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

Joubert, Joseph

35.

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

Lichtenberg, Georg C.

36.

A wicked book cannot repent.

Proverb

37.

You are wise, witty and wonderful, but you spend too much time reading this sort of stuff.

Critchfield, Jim

38.

After all, the world is not a stage -- not to me: nor a theatre: nor a show-house of any sort. And art, especially novels, are not little theatres where the reader sits aloft and watches... and sighs, commiserates, condones and smiles. That's what you want a book to be: because it leaves you so safe and superior, with your two-dollar ticket to the show. And that's what my books are not and never will be. Whoever reads me will be in the thick of the scrimmage, and if he doesn't like it -- if he wants a safe seat in the audience -- let him read someone else.

Lawrence, D. H.

39.

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

Mencken, H. L.

40.

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

Frost, Robert

41.

Reading makes immigrants of us all. It takes us away from home, but more important, it finds homes for us everywhere.

Rochman, Hazel

42.

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

Barrett, E.S.

43.

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

Carlyle, Thomas

44.

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

Secondat, Charles de

45.

For a good book has this quality, that it is not merely a petrifaction of its author, but that once it has been tossed behind, like Deucalion's little stone, it acquires a separate and vivid life of its own.

Lejeune, Caroline

46.

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

Johnson, Samuel

47.

There is a set of religious, or rather moral, writings which teach that virtue is the certain road to happiness, and vice to misery in this world. A very wholesome and comfortable doctrine, and to which we have but one objection, namely, that it is not true.

Fielding, Henry

48.

From the moment I picked your book up until I laid it down I was convulsed with laughter. Some day I intend reading it.

Marx, Groucho

49.

Books in a large university library system: 2, 000,000. Books in an average large city library: 1 0,000. Average number of books in a chain bookstore: 30, 000. Books in an average neighborhood branch library: 20, 000.

Horowitz, Lois

50.

Books are the blessed chloroform of the mind.

Chambers, Robert