Motivational Quotes

Books - reading

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

Best Quotes about Books - reading

Readers are less and less seen as mere non-writers, the subhuman other or flawed derivative of the author; the lack of a pen is no longer a shameful mark of secondary status but a positively enabling space, just as within every writer can be seen to lurk, as a repressed but contaminating antithesis, a reader.

Eagleton, Terry

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

I wish I could write a beautiful book to break those hearts that are soon to cease to exist: a book of faith and small neat worlds and of people who live by the philosophies of popular songs.

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

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

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

To sit alone in the lamplight with a book spread out before you hold intimate converse with men of unseen generations -- such is pleasure beyond compare.

Kenko, Yoshida

The things I want to know are in books; my best friend is the man who'll get me a book I ain't read.

Lincoln, Abraham

The novel can't compete with cars, the movies, television, and liquor. A guy who's had a good feed and tanked up on good wine gives his old lady a kiss after supper and his day is over. Finished.

Celine, Louis-Ferdinand

10.

Only a generation of readers will span a generation of writers.

Spielberg, Steven

11.

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

Byron, Lord

12.

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

13.

You will, I am sure, agree with me that... if page 534 only finds us in the second chapter, the length of the first one must have been really intolerable.

Doyle, Sir Arthur Conan

14.

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

Secondat, Charles de

15.

What is important is not to be able to read rapidly, but to be able to decide what not to read.

Mccay, James T.

16.

The man who does not read books has no advantage over the man that can not read them.

Twain, Mark

17.

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

Lee, Harper

18.

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

Disraeli, Benjamin

19.

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

20.

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

21.

People are much more willing to lend you books than bookcases.

Twain, Mark

22.

There is a set of religious, or rather moral, writings which teach that virtue is the certain road to happiness, and vice to misery in this world. A very wholesome and comfortable doctrine, and to which we have but one objection, namely, that it is not true.

Fielding, Henry

23.

The Bible remained for me a book of books, still divine -- but divine in the sense that all great books are divine which teach men how to live righteously.

Keith, Sir Arthur

24.

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

25.

Who ever converses among old books will be hard to please among the new.

Temple, Sir William

26.

The books we think we ought to read are poky, dull, and dry; The books that we would like to read we are ashamed to buy; The books that people talk about we never can recall; And the books that people give us, oh, they're the worst of all.

Wells, Carolyn

27.

Read nothing that you do not care to remember, and remember nothing you do not mean to use.

Blackie, Professor

28.

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

29.

The book you don't read won't help.

Rohn, Jim

30.

A book is a mirror: If an ass peers into it, you can't expect an apostle to look out.

Lichtenberg, Georg C.

31.

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

32.

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

Hope, Anthony

33.

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

34.

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

Hood, Thomas

35.

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

36.

My books are water; those of the great geniuses are wine -- everybody drinks water.

Twain, Mark

37.

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

38.

Hypocrite reader -- my fellow -- my brother!

Baudelaire, Charles

39.

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

40.

There are people who read too much: bibliobibuli. I know some who are constantly drunk on books, as other men are drunk on whiskey or religion. They wander through this most diverting and stimulating of worlds in a haze, seeing nothing and hearing nothing.

Mencken, H. L.

41.

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

Locke, John

42.

What we become depends on what we read after all the professors have finished with us. The greatest university of all is the collection of books.

Carlyle, Thomas

43.

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

Maugham, W. Somerset

44.

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

Harington, John

45.

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

46.

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

Porter, Noah

47.

The books that everybody admires are those that nobody reads.

France, Anatole

48.

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

49.

Books in a large university library system: 2, 000,000. Books in an average large city library: 1 0,000. Average number of books in a chain bookstore: 30, 000. Books in an average neighborhood branch library: 20, 000.

Horowitz, Lois

50.

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

Coolio