Motivational Quotes

Books - reading

Books are men of higher stature; the only men that speak aloud for future times to hear.

- Barrett, E.S.

Best Quotes about Books - reading

Does there, I wonder, exist a being who has read all, or approximately all, that the person of average culture is supposed to have read, and that not to have read is a social sin? If such a being does exist, surely he is an old, a very old man.

Bennett, Arnold

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

Dane, Frank

A good title is the title of a successful book.

Chandler, Raymond

To buy books would be a good thing if we also could buy the time to read them.

Schopenhauer, Arthur

I love to lose myself in other men's minds. When I am not walking, I am reading. I cannot sit and think; books think for me.

Lamb, Charles

A wicked book cannot repent.

Proverb

No story is the same to us after a lapse of time; or rather we who read it are no longer the same interpreters.

Eliot, George

The printing press is either the greatest blessing or the greatest curse of modern times, sometimes one forgets which it is.

Barrie, Sir James M.

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''

10.

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.

McKenna, Richard

11.

A book might be written on the injustice of the just.

Hope, Anthony

12.

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

13.

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

Erasmus, Desiderius

14.

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

Millay, Edna St. Vincent

15.

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

Vaneigem, Raoul

16.

Books constitute capital. A library book lasts as long as a house, for hundreds of years. It is not, then, an article of mere consumption but fairly of capital, and often in the case of professional men, setting out in life, it is their only capital.

Jefferson, Thomas

17.

For a good book has this quality, that it is not merely a petrifaction of its author, but that once it has been tossed behind, like Deucalion's little stone, it acquires a separate and vivid life of its own.

Lejeune, Caroline

18.

I heard his library burned down and both books were destroyed -- and one of them hadn't even been colored in yet.

Dawkins, John

19.

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

Brookner, Anita

20.

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

Schopenhauer, Arthur

21.

You should read books like you take medicine, by advice, and not by advertisement.

Ruskin, John

22.

The last thing one discovers in composing a work is what to put first.

Pascal, Blaise

23.

No furniture is so charming as books.

Smith, Sydney

24.

Prerequisite for rereadability in books: that they be forgettable.

Rostand, Jean

25.

If I have not read a book before, it is, for all intents and purposes, new to me whether it was printed yesterday or three hundred years ago.

Hazlitt, William

26.

The books one has written in the past have two surprises in store: one couldn't write them again, and wouldn't want to.

Rostand, Jean

27.

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

Gibbon, Edward

28.

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

29.

Readers are less and less seen as mere non-writers, the subhuman other or flawed derivative of the author; the lack of a pen is no longer a shameful mark of secondary status but a positively enabling space, just as within every writer can be seen to lurk, as a repressed but contaminating antithesis, a reader.

Eagleton, Terry

30.

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.

31.

Surviving and thriving as a professional today demands two new approaches to the written word. First, it requires a new approach to orchestrating information, by skillfully choosing what to read and what to ignore. Second, it requires a new approach to integrating information, by reading faster and with greater comprehension.

Calano, Jimmy

32.

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

33.

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

Sandwell, B. K.

34.

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.

35.

A novel points out that the world consists entirely of exceptions.

Carey, Joyce

36.

What gunpowder did for war the printing press has done for the mind.

Phillips, Wendell

37.

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.

38.

From the moment I picked your book up until I laid it down I was convulsed with laughter. Some day I intend reading it.

Marx, Groucho

39.

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

40.

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

Mansfield, Katherine

41.

The reason that fiction is more interesting than any other form of literature, to those who really like to study people, is that in fiction the author can really tell the truth without humiliating himself.

Roosevelt, Eleanor

42.

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

Temple, Sir William

43.

There are books so alive that you're always afraid that while you weren't reading, the book has gone and changed, has shifted like a river; while you went on living, it went on living too, and like a river moved on and moved away. No one has stepped twice into the same river. But did anyone ever step twice into the same book?

Tsvetaeva, Marina

44.

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

Adler, Mortimer J.

45.

I used to walk to school with my nose buried in a book.

Coolio

46.

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

Shaw, George Bernard

47.

I can't bear art that you can walk round and admire. A book should be either a bandit or a rebel or a man in the crowd.

Lawrence, D. H.

48.

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.

49.

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

Jackson, Holbrook

50.

In the dark colony of night, when I consider man's magnificent capacity for malice, madness, folly, envy, rage, and destructiveness, and I wonder whether we shall not end up as breakfast for newts and polyps, I seem to hear the muffled cries of all the words in all the books with covers closed.

Rosten, Leo