Motivational Quotes

Books - reading

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

Best Quotes about Books - reading

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

Trollope, Anthony

Happy is he who has laid up in his youth, and held fast in all fortune, a genuine and passionate love for reading.

Choate, Rufus

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

Everything you need for better future and success has already been written. And guess what? All you have to do is go to the library.

Rohn, Jim

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

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

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

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

Rohn, Jim

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

10.

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

Millay, Edna St. Vincent

11.

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.

12.

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

13.

One sheds one's sicknesses in books -- repeats and presents again one's emotions, to be master of them.

Lawrence, D. H.

14.

The age of the book is almost gone.

Steiner, George

15.

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

16.

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

Mansfield, Katherine

17.

Of all the ways of acquiring books, writing them oneself is regarded as the most praiseworthy method. Writers are really people who write books not because they are poor, but because they are dissatisfied with the books which they could buy but do not like.

Benjamin, Walter

18.

I can't bear art that you can walk round and admire. A book should be either a bandit or a rebel or a man in the crowd.

Lawrence, D. H.

19.

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.

20.

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

21.

In science read the newest works, in literature read the oldest.

Bulwer-Lytton, Edward G.

22.

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

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 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

25.

The Bible remained for me a book of books, still divine -- but divine in the sense that all great books are divine which teach men how to live righteously.

Keith, Sir Arthur

26.

A book that is shut is but a block.

Fuller, Thomas

27.

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

28.

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

Bevan, Aneurin

29.

The mere brute pleasure of reading --the sort of pleasure a cow must have in grazing.

Chesterton, Gilbert K.

30.

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

31.

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

32.

'Tis pleasant, sure, to see one's name in print; A book's a book, although there's nothing in it.

Byron, Lord

33.

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.

34.

The worst readers are those who behave like plundering troops: they take away a few things they can use, dirty and confound the remainder, and revile the whole.

Nietzsche, Friedrich

35.

Learning to read has been reduced to a process of mastering a series of narrow, specific, hierarchical skills. Where armed-forces recruits learn the components of a rifle or the intricacies of close order drill by the numbers, recruits to reading learn its mechanics sound by sound and word by word.

Gross, Jacquelyn

36.

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

Critchfield, Jim

37.

To read well, that is, to read true books in a true spirit, is a noble exercise, and one that will task the reader more than any other exercise which the customs of the day esteem. It requires a training such as the athletes underwent, the steady intention almost of the whole life to this object.

Thoreau, Henry David

38.

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

39.

You can either read something many times in order to be assured that you got it all, or else you can define your purpose and use techniques which will assure that you have met it and gotten what you need.

Kump, Peter

40.

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

41.

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

Johnson, Samuel

42.

When we read a story, we inhabit it. The covers of the book are like a roof and four walls. What is to happen next will take place within the four walls of the story. And this is possible because the story's voice makes everything its own.

Berger, John

43.

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

44.

You will find most books worth reading are worth reading twice.

Morely, John

45.

To use books rightly, is to go to them for help; to appeal to them when our own knowledge and power fail; to be led by them into wider sight and purer conception than our own, and to receive from them the united sentence of the judges and councils of all time, against our solitary and unstable opinions.

Ruskin, John

46.

My books kept me from the ring, the dog-pit, the tavern, and the saloon.

Hood, Thomas

47.

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

48.

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

49.

I always like to look on the optimistic side of life, but I am realistic enough to know that life is a complex matter.

Disney, Walt

50.

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