Motivational Quotes

Books - reading

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

Best Quotes about Books - reading

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

Mencken, H. L.

Everything in the world exists to end up in a book.

Mallarme, Stephane

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

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

Ruskin, John

The man who does not read books has no advantage over the man that can not read them.

Twain, Mark

Fiction reveals truth that reality obscures.

West, Jessamyn

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.

What is a diary as a rule? A document useful to the person who keeps it. Dull to the contemporary who reads it and invaluable to the student, centuries afterwards, who treasures it.

Terry, Helen

The power of a text is different when it is read from when it is copied out. Only the copied text thus commands the soul of him who is occupied with it, whereas the mere reader never discovers the new aspects of his inner self that are opened by the text, that road cut through the interior jungle forever closing behind it: because the reader follows the movement of his mind in the free flight of day-dreaming, whereas the copier submits it to command.

Benjamin, Walter

10.

Books are the blessed chloroform of the mind.

Chambers, Robert

11.

When you reread a classic, you do not see more in the book than you did before; you see more in you than there was before.

Fadiman, Clifton

12.

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

Millay, Edna St. Vincent

13.

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

Ruskin, John

14.

God be thanked for books; they are the voices of the distant and the dead, and make us heirs of the spiritual life of past ages.

Channing, William Ellery

15.

The constant habit of perusing devout books is so indispensable, that it has been termed the oil of the lamp of prayer. Too much reading, however, and too little meditation, may produce the effect of a lamp inverted; which is extinguished by the very excess of that ailment, whose property is to feed it.

More, Hannah

16.

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

Hugo, Victor

17.

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

Joubert, Joseph

18.

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

Chesterton, Gilbert K.

19.

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

Leacock, Stephen B.

20.

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

21.

Everything in this book may be wrong. [The Savior's Manual]

Bach, Richard

22.

Books are lighthouses erected in the great sea of time.

Whipple, Edwin P.

23.

The most foolish kind of a book is a kind of leaky boat on the sea of wisdom; some of the wisdom will get in anyhow.

Holmes, Oliver Wendell

24.

Early in the morning, at break of day, in all the freshness and dawn of one's strength, to read a book --I call that vicious!

Nietzsche, Friedrich

25.

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

Colton, Charles Caleb

26.

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

Camus, Albert

27.

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.

28.

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

29.

Somewhere, everywhere, now hidden, now apparent in what ever is written down, is the form of a human being. If we seek to know him, are we idly occupied?

Woolf, Virginia

30.

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

Tupper, Martin

31.

Don't just read the easy stuff. You may be entertained by it, but you will never grow from it.

Rohn, Jim

32.

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.

33.

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

Locke, John

34.

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

Marcel, Anthony

35.

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

Auden, W. H.

36.

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

37.

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

Brown, Les

38.

To read too many books is harmful.

Zedong, Mao

39.

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

40.

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

Temple, Sir William

41.

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

42.

A successful book cannot afford to be more than ten percent new.

Mcluhan, Marshall

43.

Books are not men and yet they stay alive.

Benet, Stephen Vincent

44.

Here, my dear Lucy, hide these books. Quick, quick! Fling Peregrine Pickle under the toilette --throw Roderick Random into the closet --put The Innocent Adultery into The Whole Duty of Man; thrust Lord Aimworth under the sofa! cram Ovid behind the bolster; there --put The Man of Feeling into your pocket. Now for them.

Sheridan, Richard Brinsley

45.

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

46.

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

47.

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

48.

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

49.

Our high respect for a well read person is praise enough for literature.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

50.

The age of the book is almost gone.

Steiner, George