Motivational Quotes

Books - reading

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

- Auden, W. H.

Best Quotes about Books - reading

If a book comes from the heart it will contrive to reach other hearts. All art and author craft are of small account to that.

Carlyle, Thomas

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

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

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

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

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 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

Thank you for sending me a copy of your book -- I'll waste no time reading it.

Hadas, Moses

Readers are plentiful: thinkers are rare.

Martineau, Harriet

10.

Thy books should, like thy friends, not many be, yet such wherein men may thy judgment see.

Wycherley, William

11.

Beware of the person of one book.

Aquinas, St. Thomas

12.

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

Locke, John

13.

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

Barrett, E.S.

14.

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

15.

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

16.

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

Wilde, Oscar

17.

Our high respect for a well read person is praise enough for literature.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

18.

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

Brookner, Anita

19.

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

Channing, William Ellery

20.

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

Mccay, James T.

21.

A multitude of books distracts the mind.

Socrates

22.

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

Mencken, H. L.

23.

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

24.

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

Marcel, Anthony

25.

Books are lighthouses erected in the great sea of time.

Whipple, Edwin P.

26.

Reading makes immigrants of us all. It takes us away from home, but more important, it finds homes for us everywhere.

Rochman, Hazel

27.

A novel is never anything, but a philosophy put into images.

Camus, Albert

28.

Books that you carry to the fire, and hold readily in your hand, are most useful after all.

Johnson, Samuel

29.

All good books are alike in that they are truer than if they had really happened and after you are finished reading one you will feel that all that happened to you and afterwards it all belongs to you; the good and the bad, the ecstasy, the remorse, and sorrow, the people and the places and how the weather was.

Hemingway, Ernest

30.

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.

31.

A book worth reading is worth buying.

Ruskin, John

32.

As writers become more numerous, it is natural for readers to become more indolent; whence must necessarily arise a desire of attaining knowledge with the greatest possible ease.

Goldsmith, Oliver

33.

Books are standing counselors and preachers, always at hand, and always disinterested; having this advantage over oral instructors, that they are ready to repeat their lesson as often as we please.

Chambers, Oswald

34.

I feel a kind of reverence for the first books of young authors. There is so much aspiration in them, so much audacious hope and trembling fear, so much of the heart's history, that all errors and shortcomings are for a while lost sight of in the amiable self assertion of youth.

Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth

35.

A book may be compared to your neighbor: if it be good, it cannot last too long; if bad, you cannot get rid of it too early.

Brooke, Rupert

36.

The book salesman should be honored because he brings to our attention, as a rule, the very books we need most and neglect most.

Crane, Frank

37.

Today a reader, tomorrow a leader.

Fusselman, W.

38.

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

39.

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

40.

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

41.

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

42.

Digressions, incontestably, are the sunshine; they are the life, the soul of reading! Take them out of this book, for instance, --you might as well take the book along with them; --one cold external winter would reign in every page of it; restore them to the writer; --he steps forth like a bridegroom, --bids All-hail; brings in variety, and forbids the appetite to fail.

Sterne, Laurence

43.

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

Hugo, Victor

44.

No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader.

Frost, Robert

45.

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

Dawkins, John

46.

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

Spielberg, Steven

47.

Books to judicious compilers, are useful; to particular arts and professions, they are absolutely necessary; to men of real science, they are tools: but more are tools to them.

Johnson

48.

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

Carey, Joyce

49.

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

Hope, Anthony

50.

Then I though of reading -- the nice and subtle happiness of reading ... this joy not dulled by age, this polite and unpunishable vice, this selfish, serene, lifelong intoxication.

Smith, Logan Pearsall