Motivational Quotes

Books - reading

The world may be full of fourth-rate writers but it's also full of fourth-rate readers.

- Barstow, Stan

Best Quotes about Books - reading

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

Books are lighthouses erected in the great sea of time.

Whipple, Edwin P.

The book salesman should be honored because he brings to our attention, as a rule, the very books we need most and neglect most.

Crane, Frank

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

Until I feared I would lose it, I never loved to read. One does not love breathing.

Lee, Harper

I read the newspaper avidly. It is my one form of continuous fiction.

Bevan, Aneurin

The newest books are those that never grow old.

Jackson, George Holbrook

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

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

Mallarme, Stephane

10.

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

Rohn, Jim

11.

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

12.

Books are the bees which carry the quickening pollen from one to another mind.

Lowell, James Russell

13.

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

14.

To feel most beautifully alive means to be reading something beautiful, ready always to apprehend in the flow of language the sudden flash of poetry.

Bachelard, Gaston

15.

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

Leacock, Stephen B.

16.

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

17.

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

Maclennan, Hugh

18.

Next, in importance to books are their titles.

Davies, Paul

19.

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

20.

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

Baker, Nicholson

21.

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

22.

The words of my book nothing, the drift of it everything.

Whitman, Walt

23.

A book that is shut is but a block.

Fuller, Thomas

24.

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

25.

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

Lawrence, D. H.

26.

The world may be full of fourth-rate writers but it's also full of fourth-rate readers.

Barstow, Stan

27.

The books that everybody admires are those that nobody reads.

France, Anatole

28.

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

Chappell, Warren

29.

The reading or non-reading a book will never keep down a single petticoat.

Byron, Lord

30.

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

Blackie, Professor

31.

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

32.

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

33.

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

34.

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

Ruskin, John

35.

A bad book is the worse that it cannot repent. It has not been the devil's policy to keep the masses of mankind in ignorance; but finding that they will read, he is doing all in his power to poison their books.

Kirk, E.N.

36.

Read good, big important things.

Noonan, Peggy

37.

All the known world, excepting only savage nations, is governed by books.

Voltaire

38.

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.

39.

There are very many people who read simply to prevent themselves from thinking.

Lichtenberg, Georg C.

40.

Books and marriage go ill together.

Moliere

41.

The mortality of all inanimate things is terrible to me, but that of books most of all.

Howells, William Dean

42.

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

43.

A book worth reading is worth buying.

Ruskin, John

44.

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

45.

Much reading is an oppression of the mind, and extinguishes the natural candle, which is the reason of so many senseless scholars in the world.

Penn, William

46.

The age of the book is almost gone.

Steiner, George

47.

A bad book is as much of a labor to write as a good one; it comes as sincerely from the author's soul.

Huxley, Aldous

48.

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

49.

When the book comes out it may hurt you -- but in order for me to do it, it had to hurt me first. I can only tell you about yourself as much as I can face about myself.

Baldwin, James

50.

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