Motivational Quotes

Books - reading

The books that the world calls immoral are the books that show the world its own shame.

- Wilde, Oscar

Best Quotes about Books - reading

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

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.

Books and marriage go ill together.

Moliere

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

Any book that helps a child to form a habit of reading, to make reading one of his deep and continuing needs, is good for him.

McKenna, Richard

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

Ruskin, John

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

A man ought to read just as his inclination leads him; for what he reads as a task will do him little good.

Johnson, Samuel

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

Brodsky, Joseph

10.

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

11.

Somewhere, everywhere, now hidden, now apparent in what ever is written down, is the form of a human being. If we seek to know him, are we idly occupied?

Woolf, Virginia

12.

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

13.

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

Pound, Ezra

14.

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

15.

When I get a little money, I buy books; and if any is left I buy food and clothes.

Erasmus, Desiderius

16.

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

17.

A book that is shut is but a block.

Fuller, Thomas

18.

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

19.

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

20.

There is no robber worse than a bad book.

Proverb, Italian

21.

The books one has written in the past have two surprises in store: one couldn't write them again, and wouldn't want to.

Rostand, Jean

22.

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

23.

There are two kinds of books. Those that no one reads and those that no one ought to read.

Mencken, H. L.

24.

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

Howells, William Dean

25.

I am a part of everything that I have read.

Kieran, John

26.

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

Whitman, Walt

27.

Books, like friends, should be few and well chosen. Like friends, too, we should return to them again and again for, like true friends, they will never fail us -- never cease to instruct -- never cloy.

Colton, Charles Caleb

28.

The age of the book is almost gone.

Steiner, George

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.

I used to walk to school with my nose buried in a book.

Coolio

31.

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

Descartes, Rene

32.

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

Hugo, Victor

33.

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

Parker, Dorothy

34.

We ought to reverence books; to look on them as useful and mighty things. If they are good and true, whether they are about religion, politics, farming, trade, law, or medicine, they are the message of Christ, the maker of all things -- the teacher of all truth.

Kingsley, Charles

35.

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

Pascal, Blaise

36.

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

37.

Reading the Scriptures is an uplifting experience.

38.

From the moment I picked your book up until I laid it down I was convulsed with laughter. Some day I intend reading it.

Marx, Groucho

39.

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

Maugham, W. Somerset

40.

When you have mastered numbers, you will in fact no longer be reading numbers, any more than you read words when reading books You will be reading meanings.

Geneen, Harold S.

41.

I divide all readers into two classes: those who read to remember and those who read to forget.

Phelps, William Lyon

42.

I don't think any good book is based on factual experience. Bad books are about things the writer already knew before he wrote them.

Fuentes, Carlos

43.

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

44.

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

Hugo, Victor

45.

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

Bulwer-Lytton, Edward G.

46.

To buy books would be a good thing if we also could buy the time to read them.

Schopenhauer, Arthur

47.

A bad book is as much of a labor to write as a good one; it comes as sincerely from the author's soul.

Huxley, Aldous

48.

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

49.

Readers are plentiful: thinkers are rare.

Martineau, Harriet

50.

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

Butler, Samuel