Motivational Quotes

Books - reading

The age of the book is almost gone.

- Steiner, George

Best Quotes about Books - reading

The good of a book lies in its being read. A book is made up of signs that speak of other signs, which in their turn speak of things. Without an eye to read them, a book contains signs that produce no concepts; therefore it is dumb.

Eco, Umberto

Prerequisite for rereadability in books: that they be forgettable.

Rostand, Jean

Read, read, read. Read everything-- trash, classics, good and bad, and see how they do it. Just like a carpenter who works as an apprentice and studies the master. Read! You'll absorb it. Then write. If it is good, you'll find out. If it's not, throw it out the window.

Faulkner, William

The reason a writer writes a book is to forget a book and the reason a reader reads one is to remember it.

Wolfe, Thomas

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

Critchfield, Jim

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

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.

Early in the morning, at break of day, in all the freshness and dawn of one's strength, to read a book --I call that vicious!

Nietzsche, Friedrich

Books and marriage go ill together.

Moliere

10.

A house without books is like a room without windows. No man has a right to bring up his children without surrounding them with books, if he has the means to buy them. It is a wrong to his family. Children learn to read by being in the presence of books. The love of knowledge comes with reading and grows upon it. And the love of knowledge, in a young mind, is almost always a warrant against the inferior excitement of passions and vices.

Mann, Horace

11.

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

Butler, Samuel

12.

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''

13.

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

Lawrence, D. H.

14.

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.

15.

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

16.

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

Hood, Thomas

17.

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

Marcel, Anthony

18.

The real risks for any artist are taken in pushing the work to the limits of what is possible, in the attempt to increase the sum of what it is possible to think. Books become good when they go to this edge and risk falling over it --when they endanger the artist by reason of what he has, or has not, artistically dared.

Rushdie, Salman

19.

'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

20.

He has only half learned the art of reading who has not added to it the more refined art of skipping and skimming.

Balfour, Arthur James

21.

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

Harington, John

22.

I am not a speed reader. I am a speed understander.

Asimov, Isaac

23.

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

Hugo, Victor

24.

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

25.

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

Maugham, W. Somerset

26.

Books constitute capital. A library book lasts as long as a house, for hundreds of years. It is not, then, an article of mere consumption but fairly of capital, and often in the case of professional men, setting out in life, it is their only capital.

Jefferson, Thomas

27.

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

28.

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

29.

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

30.

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

31.

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

32.

A wicked book cannot repent.

Proverb

33.

A novel is a mirror carried along a main road.

Stendhal, Henri B.

34.

What gunpowder did for war the printing press has done for the mind.

Phillips, Wendell

35.

I suggest that the only books that influence us are those for which we are ready, and which have gone a little further down our particular path than we have yet got ourselves.

Forster, Edward M.

36.

Some books leave us free and some books make us free.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

37.

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

Pound, Ezra

38.

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

Johnson, Samuel

39.

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

Vaneigem, Raoul

40.

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

Belloc, Hilaire

41.

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

42.

Except a living man there is nothing more wonderful than a book! a message to us from the dead -- from human souls we never saw, who lived, perhaps, thousands of miles away. And yet these, in those little sheets of paper, speak to us, arouse us, terrify us, teach us, comfort us, open their hearts to us as brothers.

Kingsley, Charles

43.

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

44.

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

Pascal, Blaise

45.

The constant habit of perusing devout books is so indispensable, that it has been termed the oil of the lamp of prayer. Too much reading, however, and too little meditation, may produce the effect of a lamp inverted; which is extinguished by the very excess of that ailment, whose property is to feed it.

More, Hannah

46.

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

Gibbon, Edward

47.

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

48.

Much reading is an oppression of the mind, and extinguishes the natural candle, which is the reason of so many senseless scholars in the world.

Penn, William

49.

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

50.

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

Pound, Ezra