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

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

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

One sheds one's sicknesses in books -- repeats and presents again one's emotions, to be master of them.

Lawrence, D. H.

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

Lee, Spike

To read too many books is harmful.

Zedong, Mao

A library is thought in cold storage.

Samuel, Herbert

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

Rohn, Jim

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

Hubbard, Elbert

A person of mature years and ripe development, who is expecting nothing from literature but the corroboration and renewal of past ideas, may find satisfaction in a lucidity so complete as to occasion no imaginative excitement, but young and ambitious students are not content with it. They seek the excitement because they are capable of the growth that it accompanies.

Cooley, Charles Horton

10.

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

Marcel, Anthony

11.

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

Tupper, Martin

12.

Reading is a basic tool in the living of a good life.

Adler, Mortimer J.

13.

A conventional good read is usually a bad read, a relaxing bath in what we know already. A true good read is surely an act of innovative creation in which we, the readers, become conspirators.

Bradbury, Malcolm

14.

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

Murray, William

15.

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

Asimov, Isaac

16.

The reading of all good books is like a conversation with all the finest men of past centuries.

Descartes, Rene

17.

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

Brookner, Anita

18.

Hypocrite reader -- my fellow -- my brother!

Baudelaire, Charles

19.

Every abridgement of a good book is a fool abridged.

Montaigne, Michel Eyquem De

20.

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

Rohn, Jim

21.

Read good, big important things.

Noonan, Peggy

22.

The best effect of any book, is that it excites the reader to self-activity.

Carlyle, Thomas

23.

Books are divided into two classes, the books of the hour and the books of all time.

Ruskin, John

24.

Those who do not read are no better off than those who cannot read.

25.

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

26.

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.

27.

Without books the development of civilization would have been impossible. They are the engines of change, windows on the world, Lighthouses as the poet said erected in the sea of time. They are companions, teachers, magicians, bankers of the treasures of the mind, Books are humanity in print.

Schopenhauer, Arthur

28.

It does not follow because many books are written by persons born in America that there exists an American literature. Books which imitate or represent the thoughts and life of Europe do not constitute an American literature. Before such can exist, an original idea must animate this nation and fresh currents of life must call into life fresh thoughts along the shore.

Fuller, Margaret

29.

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

30.

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

Parker, Dorothy

31.

I am a part of everything that I have read.

Kieran, John

32.

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

33.

Books had instant replay long before televised sports.

Williams, Bert

34.

Ideally a book would have no order to it, and the reader would have to discover his own.

Vaneigem, Raoul

35.

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

36.

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

Temple, Sir William

37.

There is more treasure in books than in all the pirates loot on Treasure Island and best of all, you can enjoy these riches every day of your life.

Disney, Walt

38.

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

Schopenhauer, Arthur

39.

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

40.

The worst readers are those who behave like plundering troops: they take away a few things they can use, dirty and confound the remainder, and revile the whole.

Nietzsche, Friedrich

41.

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

Whitman, Walt

42.

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

Barstow, Stan

43.

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

Lichtenberg, Georg C.

44.

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.

45.

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

46.

The books that everybody admires are those that nobody reads.

France, Anatole

47.

A novel is a mirror carried along a main road.

Stendhal, Henri B.

48.

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

Frost, Robert

49.

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.