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

Next to acquiring good friends, the best acquisition is that of good books.

Colton, Charles Caleb

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

Lawrence, D. H.

A novel must be exceptionally good to live as long as the average cat.

Maclennan, Hugh

When a book raises your spirit, and inspires you with noble and manly thoughts, seek for no other test of its excellence. It is good, and made by a good workman.

Bruyere, Jean De La

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

Millay, Edna St. Vincent

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

Auden, W. H.

I wish I could write a beautiful book to break those hearts that are soon to cease to exist: a book of faith and small neat worlds and of people who live by the philosophies of popular songs.

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

Chamfort, Sebastien-Roch Nicolas De

Nine-tenths of the existing books are nonsense and the clever books are the refutation of that nonsense.

Disraeli, Benjamin

10.

To read well, that is, to read true books in a true spirit, is a noble exercise, and one that will task the reader more than any other exercise which the customs of the day esteem. It requires a training such as the athletes underwent, the steady intention almost of the whole life to this object.

Thoreau, Henry David

11.

What is reading, but silent conversation.

Landor, Walter Savage

12.

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

Gibbon, Edward

13.

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

Harington, John

14.

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

15.

A book is like a man -- clever and dull, brave and cowardly, beautiful and ugly. For every flowering thought there will be a page like a wet and mangy mongrel, and for every looping flight a tap on the wing and a reminder that wax cannot hold the feathers firm too near the sun.

Steinbeck, John

16.

There was a time when the world acted on books; now books act on the world.

Joubert, Joseph

17.

Read Homer once, and you can read no more. For all books else appear so mean, and so poor. Verse will seem prose; but still persist to read, and Homer will be all the books you need.

Buckingham, Duke of

18.

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

19.

Fiction reveals truth that reality obscures.

West, Jessamyn

20.

I am a part of everything that I have read.

Kieran, John

21.

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

22.

Of all the ways of acquiring books, writing them oneself is regarded as the most praiseworthy method. Writers are really people who write books not because they are poor, but because they are dissatisfied with the books which they could buy but do not like.

Benjamin, Walter

23.

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

24.

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

Gibbon, Edward

25.

To read too many books is harmful.

Zedong, Mao

26.

The greatest gift is the passion for reading. It is cheap, it consoles, it distracts, it excites, it gives you knowledge of the world and experience of a wide kind. It is a moral illumination.

Hardwick, Elizabeth

27.

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

Luther, Martin

28.

A novel is a mirror carried along a main road.

Stendhal, Henri B.

29.

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

30.

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

Carlyle, Thomas

31.

Books succeed, and lives fail.

Browning, Elizabeth Barrett

32.

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

Fuller, Margaret

33.

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

Mencken, H. L.

34.

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

35.

After all manner of professors have done their best for us, the place we are to get knowledge is in books. The true university of these days is a collection of books.

Carlyle, Thomas

36.

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

37.

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

Hope, Anthony

38.

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.

39.

When you have mastered numbers, you will in fact no longer be reading numbers, any more than you read words when reading books You will be reading meanings.

Geneen, Harold S.

40.

You can either read something many times in order to be assured that you got it all, or else you can define your purpose and use techniques which will assure that you have met it and gotten what you need.

Kump, Peter

41.

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

Blackie, Professor

42.

To sit alone in the lamplight with a book spread out before you hold intimate converse with men of unseen generations -- such is pleasure beyond compare.

Kenko, Yoshida

43.

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

44.

Learning to read has been reduced to a process of mastering a series of narrow, specific, hierarchical skills. Where armed-forces recruits learn the components of a rifle or the intricacies of close order drill by the numbers, recruits to reading learn its mechanics sound by sound and word by word.

Gross, Jacquelyn

45.

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

Sandwell, B. K.

46.

The classics are only primitive literature. They belong to the same class as primitive machinery and primitive music and primitive medicine.

Leacock, Stephen B.

47.

A book worth reading is worth buying.

Ruskin, John

48.

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

49.

Books had instant replay long before televised sports.

Williams, Bert

50.

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

Ruskin, John