Motivational Quotes

Books - reading

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

Best Quotes about Books - reading

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

Dane, Frank

I would sooner read a timetable or a catalog than nothing at all.

Maugham, W. Somerset

There are people who read too much: bibliobibuli. I know some who are constantly drunk on books, as other men are drunk on whiskey or religion. They wander through this most diverting and stimulating of worlds in a haze, seeing nothing and hearing nothing.

Mencken, H. L.

Happy is he who has laid up in his youth, and held fast in all fortune, a genuine and passionate love for reading.

Choate, Rufus

When I get a little money, I buy books; and if any is left I buy food and clothes.

Erasmus, Desiderius

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

Tupper, Martin

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

Mansfield, Katherine

Prerequisite for rereadability in books: that they be forgettable.

Rostand, Jean

If I had my way books would not be written in English, but in an exceedingly difficult secret language that only skilled professional readers and story-tellers could interpret. Then people like you would have to go to public halls and pay good prices to hear the professionals decode and read the books aloud for you. This plan would have the advantage of scaring off all amateur authors, retired politicians, country doctors and I-Married-a-Midget writers who would not have the patience to learn the secret language.

Davies, Robertson

10.

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

11.

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

12.

Book love... is your pass to the greatest, the purest, and the most perfect pleasure that God has prepared for His creatures.

Trollope, Anthony

13.

Books are the blessed chloroform of the mind.

Chambers, Robert

14.

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

Auden, W. H.

15.

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.

16.

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

Rohn, Jim

17.

A multitude of books distracts the mind.

Socrates

18.

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

19.

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

20.

The tools I need for my work are paper, tobacco, food, and a little whiskey.

Faulkner, William

21.

Books give not wisdom where none was before. But where some is, there reading makes it more.

Harington, John

22.

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

23.

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

24.

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

25.

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

Johnson, Samuel

26.

Very young children eat their books, literally devouring their contents. This is one reason for the scarcity of first editions of Alice in Wonderland and other favorites of the nursery.

Rosenbach, A. S. W.

27.

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

28.

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

Vaneigem, Raoul

29.

My books are water; those of the great geniuses are wine -- everybody drinks water.

Twain, Mark

30.

Reading the Scriptures is an uplifting experience.

31.

The more sins you confess, the more books you will sell.

Proverb, American

32.

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

33.

We ought to reverence books; to look on them as useful and mighty things. If they are good and true, whether they are about religion, politics, farming, trade, law, or medicine, they are the message of Christ, the maker of all things -- the teacher of all truth.

Kingsley, Charles

34.

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

Gibbon, Edward

35.

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

Lichtenberg, Georg C.

36.

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

Sandwell, B. K.

37.

Do we write books so that they shall merely be read? Don't we also write them for employment in the household? For one that is read from start to finish, thousands are leafed through, other thousands lie motionless, others are jammed against mouseholes, thrown at rats, others are stood on, sat on, drummed on, have gingerbread baked on them or are used to light pipes.

Lichtenberg, Georg C.

38.

There are two kinds of books. Those that no one reads and those that no one ought to read.

Mencken, H. L.

39.

'Tis the good reader that makes the good book; in every book he finds passages which seem to be confidences or sides hidden from all else and unmistakably meant for his ear; the profit of books is according to the sensibility of the reader; the profound thought or passion sleeps as in a mine, until it is discovered by an equal mind and heart.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

40.

We are too civil to books. For a few golden sentences we will turn over and actually read a volume of four or five hundred pages.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

41.

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

42.

A book worth reading is worth buying.

Ruskin, John

43.

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

Brown, Les

44.

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

45.

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.

46.

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

Lichtenberg, Georg C.

47.

In the case of good books, the point is not how many of them you can get through, but rather how many can get through to you.

Adler, Mortimer J.

48.

All the known world, excepting only savage nations, is governed by books.

Voltaire

49.

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.

50.

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