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

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

A good book is the very essence of a good man. His virtues survive in it, while the foibles and faults of his actual life are forgotten. All the goodly company of the excellent and great sit around my table, or look down on me from yonder shelves, waiting patiently to answer my questions and enrich me with their wisdom. A precious book is a foretaste of immortality.

Cuyler, Theodore L.

Begin to read a book that will help you move toward your dream.

Brown, Les

No story is the same to us after a lapse of time; or rather we who read it are no longer the same interpreters.

Eliot, George

Books are the best of things if well used; if abused, among the worst. They are good for nothing but to inspire. I had better never see a book than be warped by its attraction clean out of my own orbit, and made a satellite instead of a system.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

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

Montagu, Lady Mary Wortley

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

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.

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

Mencken, H. L.

10.

Today a reader, tomorrow a leader.

Fusselman, W.

11.

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

Baker, Nicholson

12.

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

13.

My early and invincible love of reading I would not exchange for all the riches of India.

Gibbon, Edward

14.

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

15.

Old books, you know well, are books of the world's youth, and new books are the fruits of its age.

Holmes, Oliver Wendell

16.

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

17.

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

Byron, Lord

18.

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

Forster, Edward M.

19.

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

Twain, Mark

20.

The age of the book is almost gone.

Steiner, George

21.

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

Phillips, Wendell

22.

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

Mansfield, Katherine

23.

Most books, like their authors, are born to die; of only a few books can it be said that death has no dominion over them; they live, and their influence lives forever.

Swartz, J.

24.

A library is thought in cold storage.

Samuel, Herbert

25.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

26.

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

27.

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

Rohn, Jim

28.

A bad book is the worse that it cannot repent. It has not been the devil's policy to keep the masses of mankind in ignorance; but finding that they will read, he is doing all in his power to poison their books.

Kirk, E.N.

29.

How many a man has dated a new era in his life from the reading of a book! The book exists for us, perchance, that will explain our miracles and reveal new ones. The at present unutterable things we may find somewhere uttered.

Thoreau, Henry David

30.

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

31.

There are very many people who read simply to prevent themselves from thinking.

Lichtenberg, Georg C.

32.

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

Barstow, Stan

33.

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

Schopenhauer, Arthur

34.

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

Channing, William Ellery

35.

The most foolish kind of a book is a kind of leaky boat on the sea of wisdom; some of the wisdom will get in anyhow.

Holmes, Oliver Wendell

36.

No furniture is so charming as books.

Smith, Sydney

37.

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

Lichtenberg, Georg C.

38.

The multitude of books is a great evil. There is no limit to this fever for writing.

Luther, Martin

39.

I always begin at the left with the opening word of the sentence and read toward the right and I recommend this method.

Thurber, James

40.

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

41.

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

42.

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

43.

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

Temple, Sir William

44.

The real risks for any artist are taken in pushing the work to the limits of what is possible, in the attempt to increase the sum of what it is possible to think. Books become good when they go to this edge and risk falling over it --when they endanger the artist by reason of what he has, or has not, artistically dared.

Rushdie, Salman

45.

One half who graduate from college never read another book.

True, Herbert

46.

There is creative reading as well as creative writing.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

47.

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

48.

The failure to read good books both enfeebles the vision and strengthens our most fatal tendency --the belief that the here and now is all there is.