Motivational Quotes

Books - reading

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

Best Quotes about Books - reading

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

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

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

Carlyle, Thomas

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

Millay, Edna St. Vincent

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

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

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

Hadas, Moses

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

Secondat, Charles de

Nine-tenths of the existing books are nonsense and the clever books are the refutation of that nonsense.

Disraeli, Benjamin

10.

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

11.

A novel is a mirror carried along a main road.

Stendhal, Henri B.

12.

No one can read with profit that which he cannot learn to read with pleasure.

Porter, Noah

13.

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

14.

There are books so alive that you're always afraid that while you weren't reading, the book has gone and changed, has shifted like a river; while you went on living, it went on living too, and like a river moved on and moved away. No one has stepped twice into the same river. But did anyone ever step twice into the same book?

Tsvetaeva, Marina

15.

The tools I need for my work are paper, tobacco, food, and a little whiskey.

Faulkner, William

16.

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

Mansfield, Katherine

17.

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

Camus, Albert

18.

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

19.

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

20.

The age of the book is almost gone.

Steiner, George

21.

Read good, big important things.

Noonan, Peggy

22.

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

Brodsky, Joseph

23.

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

Butler, Samuel

24.

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

Hood, Thomas

25.

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

26.

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

27.

Readers are plentiful: thinkers are rare.

Martineau, Harriet

28.

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

29.

A novel must be exceptionally good to live as long as the average cat.

Maclennan, Hugh

30.

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

Byron, Lord

31.

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

Bevan, Aneurin

32.

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

Locke, John

33.

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

Joubert, Joseph

34.

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

35.

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

Morely, John

36.

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.

37.

The chief knowledge that a man gets from reading books is the knowledge that very few of them are worth reading.

Mencken, H. L.

38.

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

39.

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

Hope, Anthony

40.

No furniture is so charming as books.

Smith, Sydney

41.

If a book comes from the heart it will contrive to reach other hearts. All art and author craft are of small account to that.

Carlyle, Thomas

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 book you don't read won't help.

Rohn, Jim

44.

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

Bulwer-Lytton, Edward G.

45.

It is from books that wise people derive consolation in the troubles of life.

Hugo, Victor

46.

The books one reads in childhood, and perhaps most of all the bad and good bad books, create in one's mind a sort of false map of the world, a series of fabulous countries into which one can retreat at odd moments throughout the rest of life, and which in some cases can survive a visit to the real countries which they are supposed to represent.

Orwell, George

47.

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

Hugo, Victor

48.

'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

49.

Until it is kindled by a spirit as flamingly alive as the one which gave it birth a book is dead to us. Words divested of their magic are but dead hieroglyphs.

Miller, Henry

50.

A multitude of books distracts the mind.

Socrates