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

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.

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

Thank you for sending me a copy of your book -- I'll waste no time reading it.

Hadas, Moses

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

Twain, Mark

A bibliophile of little means is likely to suffer often. Books don't slip from his hands but fly past him through the air, high as birds, high as prices.

Neruda, Pablo

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

In science, read by preference the newest works. In literature, read the oldest. The classics are always modern.

Lytton, Lord Edward

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

Porter, Noah

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

Camus, Albert

10.

The flood of print has turned reading into a process of gulping rather than savoring

Chappell, Warren

11.

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

Locke, John

12.

Read, read, read. Read everything-- trash, classics, good and bad, and see how they do it. Just like a carpenter who works as an apprentice and studies the master. Read! You'll absorb it. Then write. If it is good, you'll find out. If it's not, throw it out the window.

Faulkner, William

13.

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

Fuller, Margaret

14.

I divide all readers into two classes: those who read to remember and those who read to forget.

Phelps, William Lyon

15.

The world of books is the most remarkable creation of man nothing else that he builds ever lasts monuments fall; nations perish; civilization grow old and die out; new races build others. But in the world of books are volumes that have seen this happen again and again and yet live on. Still young, still as fresh as the day they were written, still telling men's hearts, of the hearts of men centuries dead.

Day, Clarence

16.

Americans will listen, but they do not care to read. War and Peace must wait for the leisure of retirement, which never really comes: meanwhile it helps to furnish the living room. Blockbusting fiction is bought as furniture. Unread, it maintains its value. Read, it looks like money wasted. Cunningly, Americans know that books contain a person, and they want the person, not the book.

Burgess, Anthony

17.

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

Twain, Mark

18.

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

19.

The reason a writer writes a book is to forget a book and the reason a reader reads one is to remember it.

Wolfe, Thomas

20.

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

Adler, Mortimer J.

21.

You are wise, witty and wonderful, but you spend too much time reading this sort of stuff.

Critchfield, Jim

22.

Footnotes are the finer-suckered surfaces that allow testicular paragraphs to hold fast to the wider reality of the library.

Baker, Nicholson

23.

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

24.

If a secret history of books could be written, and the author's private thoughts and meanings noted down alongside of his story, how many insipid volumes would become interesting, and dull tales excite the reader!

Thackeray, William M.

25.

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

Byron, Lord

26.

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

27.

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''

28.

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

Millay, Edna St. Vincent

29.

A book is a part of life, a manifestation of life, just as much as a tree or a horse or a star. It obeys its own rhythms, its own laws, whether it be a novel, a play, or a diary. The deep, hidden rhythm of life is always there -- that of the pulse, the heart beat.

Miller, Henry

30.

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

31.

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

32.

To read too many books is harmful.

Zedong, Mao

33.

Books are lighthouses erected in the great sea of time.

Whipple, Edwin P.

34.

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

Chamfort, Sebastien-Roch Nicolas De

35.

In any situation, ask yourself: What strengths do I possess that can contribute towards accomplishing something in this situation? Then follow through.

36.

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

Hugo, Victor

37.

Digressions, incontestably, are the sunshine; they are the life, the soul of reading! Take them out of this book, for instance, --you might as well take the book along with them; --one cold external winter would reign in every page of it; restore them to the writer; --he steps forth like a bridegroom, --bids All-hail; brings in variety, and forbids the appetite to fail.

Sterne, Laurence

38.

Read nothing that you do not care to remember, and remember nothing you do not mean to use.

Blackie, Professor

39.

I am a part of everything that I have read.

Kieran, John

40.

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

Shaw, George Bernard

41.

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

Mencken, H. L.

42.

Old books that have ceased to be of service should no more be abandoned than should old friends who have ceased to give pleasure.

Worsthorne, Sir Peregrine

43.

To use books rightly, is to go to them for help; to appeal to them when our own knowledge and power fail; to be led by them into wider sight and purer conception than our own, and to receive from them the united sentence of the judges and councils of all time, against our solitary and unstable opinions.

Ruskin, John

44.

A book is a mirror: If an ass peers into it, you can't expect an apostle to look out.

Lichtenberg, Georg C.

45.

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

46.

The multitude of books is a great evil. There is no limit to this fever for writing.

Luther, Martin

47.

The books we read should be chosen with great care, that they may be, as an Egyptian king wrote over his library, The medicines of the soul.

Hood, Paxton

48.

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

49.

Books are standing counselors and preachers, always at hand, and always disinterested; having this advantage over oral instructors, that they are ready to repeat their lesson as often as we please.

Chambers, Oswald

50.

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

Jackson, Holbrook