Motivational Quotes

Books - reading

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

Best Quotes about Books - reading

We should be as careful of the books we read, as of the company we keep. The dead very often have more power than the living.

Edwards, Tryon

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

Twain, Mark

A book that is shut is but a block.

Fuller, Thomas

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.

No man understands a deep book until he has seen and lived at least part of its contents.

Pound, Ezra

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

How can you dare teach a man to read until you've taught him everything else first?

Shaw, George Bernard

How many a man has dated a new era in his life from the reading of a book! The book exists for us, perchance, that will explain our miracles and reveal new ones. The at present unutterable things we may find somewhere uttered.

Thoreau, Henry David

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

Channing, William Ellery

10.

My books kept me from the ring, the dog-pit, the tavern, and the saloon.

Hood, Thomas

11.

She could give herself up to the written word as naturally as a good dancer to music or a fine swimmer to water. The only difficulty was that after finishing the last sentence she was left with a feeling at once hollow and uncomfortably full. Exactly like indigestion.

Rhys, Jean

12.

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

13.

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

14.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

15.

The unread story is not a story; it is little black marks on wood pulp. The reader, reading it, makes it live: a live thing, a story.

Guin, Ursula K. Le

16.

A wicked book cannot repent.

Proverb

17.

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

18.

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

19.

No matter how busy you may think you are, you must find time for reading, or surrender yourself to self-chosen ignorance.

Townsend, Atwood H.

20.

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

Camus, Albert

21.

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

22.

No entertainment is so cheap as reading, nor is any pleasure so lasting.

Montagu, Lady Mary Wortley

23.

'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

24.

The books we think we ought to read are poky, dull, and dry; The books that we would like to read we are ashamed to buy; The books that people talk about we never can recall; And the books that people give us, oh, they're the worst of all.

Wells, Carolyn

25.

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

26.

The mere brute pleasure of reading --the sort of pleasure a cow must have in grazing.

Chesterton, Gilbert K.

27.

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.

28.

'Tis pleasant, sure, to see one's name in print; A book's a book, although there's nothing in it.

Byron, Lord

29.

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

Faulkner, William

30.

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

Mencken, H. L.

31.

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

Belloc, Hilaire

32.

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

Rohn, Jim

33.

Books are the best of things if well used; if abused, among the worst. They are good for nothing but to inspire. I had better never see a book than be warped by its attraction clean out of my own orbit, and made a satellite instead of a system.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

34.

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

35.

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

36.

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

37.

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

38.

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

Marcel, Anthony

39.

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

40.

In science read the newest works, in literature read the oldest.

Bulwer-Lytton, Edward G.

41.

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

Forster, Edward M.

42.

Books and marriage go ill together.

Moliere

43.

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

44.

The good parts of a book may be only something a writer is lucky enough to overhear or it may be the wreck of his whole damn life --and one is as good as the other.

Hemingway, Ernest

45.

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

Mencken, H. L.

46.

Don't ask me who's influenced me. A lion is made up of the lambs he's digested, and I've been reading all my life.

Seferis, Giorgos

47.

The oldest books are still only just out to those who have not read them.

Butler, Samuel

48.

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

Lichtenberg, Georg C.

49.

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

50.

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