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

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

The Brahmins say that in their books there are many predictions of times in which it will rain. But press those books as strongly as you can, you can not get out of them a drop of water. So you can not get out of all the books that contain the best precepts the smallest good deed.

Tolstoy, Count Leo

I feel like I'm drowning. Every night, I'm carrying home loads of things to read but I'm too exhausted. I keep clipping things and Xeroxing them and planning to read them eventually, but I just end up throwing it all away and feeling guilty.

Levine, Ghita

You will be the same person in five as you are today except for the people you meet and the books you read.

Jones, Charles ''Tremendous''

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

Except a living man there is nothing more wonderful than a book! a message to us from the dead -- from human souls we never saw, who lived, perhaps, thousands of miles away. And yet these, in those little sheets of paper, speak to us, arouse us, terrify us, teach us, comfort us, open their hearts to us as brothers.

Kingsley, Charles

The great American novel has not only already been written, it has already been rejected.

Dane, Frank

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

Locke, John

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

10.

Most books today seemed to have been written overnight from books read the day before.

Chamfort, Sebastien-Roch Nicolas De

11.

I am not a speed reader. I am a speed understander.

Asimov, Isaac

12.

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

Phillips, Wendell

13.

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

Dawkins, John

14.

Everything in the world exists to end up in a book.

Mallarme, Stephane

15.

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

16.

Books are those faithful mirrors that reflect to our mind the minds of sages and heroes.

Gibbon, Edward

17.

A big leather-bound volume makes an ideal razor strap. A thin book is useful to stick under a table with a broken caster to steady it. A large, flat atlas can be used to cover a window with a broken pane. And a thick, old-fashioned heavy book with a clasp is the finest thing in the world to throw at a noisy cat.

Twain, Mark

18.

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

19.

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

Lee, Spike

20.

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

21.

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

Rohn, Jim

22.

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

Channing, William Ellery

23.

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

Pascal, Blaise

24.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

25.

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

26.

Miss a meal if you have to, but don't miss a book.

Rohn, Jim

27.

I know every book of mine by its smell, and I have but to put my nose between the pages to be reminded of all sorts of things.

Gissing, George Robert

28.

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

29.

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

30.

A good book is the best of friends, the same today and for ever.

Tupper, Martin

31.

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

32.

Everywhere I have sought rest and not found it, except sitting in a corner by myself with a little book.

Kempis, Thomas

33.

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

34.

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

Colton, Charles Caleb

35.

Books are not men and yet they stay alive.

Benet, Stephen Vincent

36.

Read as you taste fruit or savor wine, or enjoy friendship, love or life.

Jackson, Holbrook

37.

Reading is equivalent to thinking with someone else's head instead of with one's own.

Schopenhauer, Arthur

38.

Books had instant replay long before televised sports.

Williams, Bert

39.

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

Barrett, E.S.

40.

A house is not a home unless it contains food and fire for the mind as well as the body.

Fuller, Margaret

41.

With one day's reading a man may have the key in his hands.

Pound, Ezra

42.

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

43.

Reading is to the mind what exercise is to the body. It is wholesome and bracing for the mind to have its faculties kept on the stretch.

Steele, Sir Richard

44.

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.

45.

This will never be a civilized country until we expend more money for books than we do for chewing gum.

Hubbard, Elbert

46.

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

Lowell, James Russell

47.

Beware you be not swallowed up in books! An ounce of love is worth a pound of knowledge.

Wesley, John

48.

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

49.

A dose of poison can do its work but once. A bad book can go on poisoning minds for generations.

Murray, William

50.

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.