Motivational Quotes

Books - reading

Fiction reveals truth that reality obscures.

- West, Jessamyn

Best Quotes about Books - reading

A book worth reading is worth buying.

Ruskin, John

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

A novel points out that the world consists entirely of exceptions.

Carey, Joyce

Here, my dear Lucy, hide these books. Quick, quick! Fling Peregrine Pickle under the toilette --throw Roderick Random into the closet --put The Innocent Adultery into The Whole Duty of Man; thrust Lord Aimworth under the sofa! cram Ovid behind the bolster; there --put The Man of Feeling into your pocket. Now for them.

Sheridan, Richard Brinsley

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

Channing, William Ellery

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

Rohn, Jim

I am a part of everything that I have read.

Kieran, John

Until I feared I would lose it, I never loved to read. One does not love breathing.

Lee, Harper

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

10.

A real book is not one that we read, but one that reads us.

Auden, W. H.

11.

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

12.

The mortality of all inanimate things is terrible to me, but that of books most of all.

Howells, William Dean

13.

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

14.

This book is not to be tossed lightly aside, but to be hurled with great force.

Parker, Dorothy

15.

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

16.

Books are divided into two classes, the books of the hour and the books of all time.

Ruskin, John

17.

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

Locke, John

18.

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

19.

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

20.

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

Critchfield, Jim

21.

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.

22.

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

Bevan, Aneurin

23.

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

24.

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

25.

You've really got to start hitting the books because it's no joke out here.

Lee, Spike

26.

In the dark colony of night, when I consider man's magnificent capacity for malice, madness, folly, envy, rage, and destructiveness, and I wonder whether we shall not end up as breakfast for newts and polyps, I seem to hear the muffled cries of all the words in all the books with covers closed.

Rosten, Leo

27.

Books are the blessed chloroform of the mind.

Chambers, Robert

28.

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

Barrett, E.S.

29.

I am what libraries and librarians have made me, with little assistance from a professor of Greek and poets.

Sandwell, B. K.

30.

Today a reader, tomorrow a leader.

Fusselman, W.

31.

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

Brodsky, Joseph

32.

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

33.

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

34.

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

Phillips, Wendell

35.

Who kills a man kills a reasonable creature, God's image, but thee who destroys a good book, kills reason itself.

Milton, John

36.

A vacuum of ideas affects people differently than a vacuum of air, otherwise readers of books would be constantly collapsing.

Lichtenberg, Georg C.

37.

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

Faulkner, William

38.

Next to acquiring good friends, the best acquisition is that of good books.

Colton, Charles Caleb

39.

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

Marcel, Anthony

40.

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

Ruskin, John

41.

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

42.

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

43.

An empty book is like an infant's soul, in which anything may be written. It is capable of all things, but containeth nothing. I have a mind to fill this with profitable wonders.

Traherne, Thomas

44.

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

Barstow, Stan

45.

A book is like a man -- clever and dull, brave and cowardly, beautiful and ugly. For every flowering thought there will be a page like a wet and mangy mongrel, and for every looping flight a tap on the wing and a reminder that wax cannot hold the feathers firm too near the sun.

Steinbeck, John

46.

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

47.

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

Mencken, H. L.

48.

Books are the bees which carry the quickening pollen from one to another mind.

Lowell, James Russell

49.

Books and marriage go ill together.

Moliere

50.

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.

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