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

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

Mansfield, Katherine

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

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

Porter, Noah

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

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

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 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.

All the best stories in the world are but one story in reality -- the story of escape. It is the only thing which interests us all and at all times, how to escape.

Benson, Arthur Christopher

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

10.

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

Forster, Edward M.

11.

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

12.

After all, the world is not a stage -- not to me: nor a theatre: nor a show-house of any sort. And art, especially novels, are not little theatres where the reader sits aloft and watches... and sighs, commiserates, condones and smiles. That's what you want a book to be: because it leaves you so safe and superior, with your two-dollar ticket to the show. And that's what my books are not and never will be. Whoever reads me will be in the thick of the scrimmage, and if he doesn't like it -- if he wants a safe seat in the audience -- let him read someone else.

Lawrence, D. H.

13.

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.

14.

A novel must be exceptionally good to live as long as the average cat.

Maclennan, Hugh

15.

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

Camus, Albert

16.

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

17.

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

Frost, Robert

18.

A book worth reading is worth buying.

Ruskin, John

19.

The successful Accelerated Reader is able to read larger than normal blocks or bites of the printed page with each eye stop. He has accepted, without reservation, the philosophy that the most important benefit of reading is the gaining of information, ideas, mental picture and entertainment-not the fretting over words. He has come to the realization that words in and of themselves are for the most part insignificant.

Cutler, Wade E.

20.

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

Twain, Mark

21.

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

Auden, W. H.

22.

The book to read is not the one which thinks for you, but the one which makes you think. No book in the world equals the Bible for that.

Mccosh

23.

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

Mallarme, Stephane

24.

Learning to read has been reduced to a process of mastering a series of narrow, specific, hierarchical skills. Where armed-forces recruits learn the components of a rifle or the intricacies of close order drill by the numbers, recruits to reading learn its mechanics sound by sound and word by word.

Gross, Jacquelyn

25.

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

26.

He that loves a book will never want a faithful friend, a wholesome counselor, a cheerful companion, an effectual comforter. By study, by reading, by thinking, one may innocently divert and pleasantly entertain himself, as in all weathers, as in all fortunes.

Barrow

27.

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

Howells, William Dean

28.

When I am dead, I hope it may be said: His sins were scarlet, but his books were read.

Belloc, Hilaire

29.

Read good, big important things.

Noonan, Peggy

30.

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

31.

Books succeed, and lives fail.

Browning, Elizabeth Barrett

32.

The only books that influence us are those for which we are ready, and which have gone a little farther down our particular path than we have yet got ourselves.

Forster, Edward M.

33.

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

Hugo, Victor

34.

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

Gibbon, Edward

35.

A person who publishes a book appears willfully in public with his pants down.

Millay, Edna St. Vincent

36.

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

37.

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

Whitman, Walt

38.

Who kills a man kills a reasonable creature, God's image, but thee who destroys a good book, kills reason itself.

Milton, John

39.

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.

40.

Every abridgement of a good book is a fool abridged.

Montaigne, Michel Eyquem De

41.

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

Brookner, Anita

42.

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

43.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

44.

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

45.

An empty book is like an infant's soul, in which anything may be written. It is capable of all things, but containeth nothing. I have a mind to fill this with profitable wonders.

Traherne, Thomas

46.

Education... has produced a vast population able to read but unable to distinguish what is worth reading, an easy prey to sensations and cheap appeals.

Trevelyan, G. M.

47.

All my good reading, you might say, was done in the toilet. There are passages in Ulysses which can be read only in the toilet -- if one wants to extract the full flavor of their content.

Miller, Henry

48.

I am what libraries and librarians have made me, with little assistance from a professor of Greek and poets.

Sandwell, B. K.

49.

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

Parker, Dorothy

50.

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

Fuller, Margaret