Motivational Quotes

Books - reading

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

- Tupper, Martin

Best Quotes about Books - reading

The world may be full of fourth-rate writers but it's also full of fourth-rate readers.

Barstow, Stan

One always tends to overpraise a long book, because one has got through it.

Forster, Edward M.

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.

All the best stories in the world are but one story in reality -- the story of escape. It is the only thing which interests us all and at all times, how to escape.

Benson, Arthur Christopher

The reading or non-reading a book will never keep down a single petticoat.

Byron, Lord

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

Pound, Ezra

Don't ask me who's influenced me. A lion is made up of the lambs he's digested, and I've been reading all my life.

Seferis, Giorgos

Footnotes are the finer-suckered surfaces that allow testicular paragraphs to hold fast to the wider reality of the library.

Baker, Nicholson

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

Pound, Ezra

10.

I am a part of everything that I have read.

Kieran, John

11.

Books are the blessed chloroform of the mind.

Chambers, Robert

12.

All my good reading, you might say, was done in the toilet. There are passages in Ulysses which can be read only in the toilet -- if one wants to extract the full flavor of their content.

Miller, Henry

13.

Read as you taste fruit or savor wine, or enjoy friendship, love or life.

Jackson, Holbrook

14.

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

15.

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

16.

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

Maclennan, Hugh

17.

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

18.

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

Joubert, Joseph

19.

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

Hope, Anthony

20.

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

21.

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

Carlyle, Thomas

22.

The Brahmins say that in their books there are many predictions of times in which it will rain. But press those books as strongly as you can, you can not get out of them a drop of water. So you can not get out of all the books that contain the best precepts the smallest good deed.

Tolstoy, Count Leo

23.

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

24.

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

25.

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

Critchfield, Jim

26.

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

27.

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

28.

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

29.

It is books that teach us to refine our pleasures when young, and to recall them with satisfaction when we are old.

Hunt, Leigh

30.

This will never be a civilized country until we expend more money for books than we do for chewing gum.

Hubbard, Elbert

31.

To read too many books is harmful.

Zedong, Mao

32.

The words of my book nothing, the drift of it everything.

Whitman, Walt

33.

Next, in importance to books are their titles.

Davies, Paul

34.

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

35.

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

Chamfort, Sebastien-Roch Nicolas De

36.

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

37.

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

38.

The books that everybody admires are those that nobody reads.

France, Anatole

39.

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

Locke, John

40.

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

41.

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

42.

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

Schopenhauer, Arthur

43.

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

44.

Books, books, books had found the secret of a garret-room piled high with cases in my father's name; Piled high, packed large, --where, creeping in and out among the giant fossils of my past, like some small nimble mouse between the ribs of a mastodon, I nibbled here and there at this or that box, pulling through the gap, in heats of terror, haste, victorious joy, the first book first. And how I felt it beat under my pillow, in the morning's dark. An hour before the sun would let me read! My books!

Browning, Elizabeth Barrett

45.

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

46.

The lessons taught in great books are misleading. The commerce in life is rarely so simple and never so just.

Brookner, Anita

47.

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.

48.

I heard his library burned down and both books were destroyed -- and one of them hadn't even been colored in yet.

Dawkins, John

49.

The world of books is the most remarkable creation of man nothing else that he builds ever lasts monuments fall; nations perish; civilization grow old and die out; new races build others. But in the world of books are volumes that have seen this happen again and again and yet live on. Still young, still as fresh as the day they were written, still telling men's hearts, of the hearts of men centuries dead.

Day, Clarence

50.

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

Montagu, Lady Mary Wortley