Motivational Quotes

Books - reading

No furniture is so charming as books.

- Smith, Sydney

Best Quotes about Books - reading

Every man is a volume if you know how to read him.

Channing, William Ellery

Reading a book is like re-writing it for yourself. You bring to a novel, anything you read, all your experience of the world. You bring your history and you read it in your own terms.

Carter, Angela

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

Bulwer-Lytton, Edward G.

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

The power of a text is different when it is read from when it is copied out. Only the copied text thus commands the soul of him who is occupied with it, whereas the mere reader never discovers the new aspects of his inner self that are opened by the text, that road cut through the interior jungle forever closing behind it: because the reader follows the movement of his mind in the free flight of day-dreaming, whereas the copier submits it to command.

Benjamin, Walter

A bibliophile of little means is likely to suffer often. Books don't slip from his hands but fly past him through the air, high as birds, high as prices.

Neruda, Pablo

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

Camus, Albert

You should read books like you take medicine, by advice, and not by advertisement.

Ruskin, John

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

10.

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

Chamfort, Sebastien-Roch Nicolas De

11.

Prerequisite for rereadability in books: that they be forgettable.

Rostand, Jean

12.

Next, in importance to books are their titles.

Davies, Paul

13.

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

14.

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

15.

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

Barrett, E.S.

16.

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

Bach, Richard

17.

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

18.

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

Hadas, Moses

19.

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

20.

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

Bevan, Aneurin

21.

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

Hope, Anthony

22.

Hypocrite reader -- my fellow -- my brother!

Baudelaire, Charles

23.

In the case of good books, the point is not how many of them you can get through, but rather how many can get through to you.

Adler, Mortimer J.

24.

I am a part of everything that I have read.

Kieran, John

25.

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

26.

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

27.

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

Temple, Sir William

28.

Once we have learned to read, meaning of words can somehow register without consciousness.

Marcel, Anthony

29.

Reading furnishes the mind only with material for knowledge; it is thinking that makes what we read ours.

Locke, John

30.

Only a generation of readers will span a generation of writers.

Spielberg, Steven

31.

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

32.

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

Trollope, Anthony

33.

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

34.

A good book is the very essence of a good man. His virtues survive in it, while the foibles and faults of his actual life are forgotten. All the goodly company of the excellent and great sit around my table, or look down on me from yonder shelves, waiting patiently to answer my questions and enrich me with their wisdom. A precious book is a foretaste of immortality.

Cuyler, Theodore L.

35.

Books are the blessed chloroform of the mind.

Chambers, Robert

36.

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

37.

With one day's reading a man may have the key in his hands.

Pound, Ezra

38.

Books are masters who instruct us without rods or ferules, without words or anger, without bread or money. If you approach them, they are not asleep; if you seek them, they do not hide; if you blunder, they do not scold; if you are ignorant, they do not laugh at you.

Bury, Richard De

39.

What is important is not to be able to read rapidly, but to be able to decide what not to read.

Mccay, James T.

40.

After all manner of professors have done their best for us, the place we are to get knowledge is in books. The true university of these days is a collection of books.

Carlyle, Thomas

41.

He that loves a book will never want a faithful friend, a wholesome counselor, a cheerful companion, an effectual comforter. By study, by reading, by thinking, one may innocently divert and pleasantly entertain himself, as in all weathers, as in all fortunes.

Barrow

42.

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

43.

The reading of all good books is like a conversation with all the finest men of past centuries.

Descartes, Rene

44.

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

Lawrence, D. H.

45.

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

46.

Reading is equivalent to thinking with someone else's head instead of with one's own.

Schopenhauer, Arthur

47.

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

48.

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

49.

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

50.

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

Montagu, Lady Mary Wortley