Motivational Quotes

Books - reading

Hypocrite reader -- my fellow -- my brother!

- Baudelaire, Charles

Best Quotes about Books - reading

Everywhere I have sought rest and not found it, except sitting in a corner by myself with a little book.

Kempis, Thomas

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

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

Reading a book is like re-writing it for yourself. You bring to a novel, anything you read, all your experience of the world. You bring your history and you read it in your own terms.

Carter, Angela

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

Mansfield, Katherine

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

Twain, Mark

The novel can't compete with cars, the movies, television, and liquor. A guy who's had a good feed and tanked up on good wine gives his old lady a kiss after supper and his day is over. Finished.

Celine, Louis-Ferdinand

Books are the blessed chloroform of the mind.

Chambers, Robert

What is the most precious, the most exciting smell awaiting you in the house when you return to it after a dozen years or so? The smell of roses, you think? No, moldering books.

Sinyavsky, Andre

10.

Read good, big important things.

Noonan, Peggy

11.

There are worse crimes than burning books. One of them is not reading them.

Brodsky, Joseph

12.

There is more treasure in books than in all the pirates loot on Treasure Island and best of all, you can enjoy these riches every day of your life.

Disney, Walt

13.

No matter how busy you may think you are, you must find time for reading, or surrender yourself to self-chosen ignorance.

Townsend, Atwood H.

14.

I am not a speed reader. I am a speed understander.

Asimov, Isaac

15.

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

Erasmus, Desiderius

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.

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

Leacock, Stephen B.

18.

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

Mallarme, Stephane

19.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

20.

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

Carey, Joyce

21.

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

Schopenhauer, Arthur

22.

I don't think any good book is based on factual experience. Bad books are about things the writer already knew before he wrote them.

Fuentes, Carlos

23.

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

Lichtenberg, Georg C.

24.

Books are lighthouses erected in the great sea of time.

Whipple, Edwin P.

25.

The tools I need for my work are paper, tobacco, food, and a little whiskey.

Faulkner, William

26.

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

27.

When we read a story, we inhabit it. The covers of the book are like a roof and four walls. What is to happen next will take place within the four walls of the story. And this is possible because the story's voice makes everything its own.

Berger, John

28.

Book love... is your pass to the greatest, the purest, and the most perfect pleasure that God has prepared for His creatures.

Trollope, Anthony

29.

The chief knowledge that a man gets from reading books is the knowledge that very few of them are worth reading.

Mencken, H. L.

30.

I would sooner read a timetable or a catalog than nothing at all.

Maugham, W. Somerset

31.

A good book, in the language of the book-sellers, is a salable one; in that of the curious, a scarce one; in that of men of sense, a useful and instructive one.

Chambers, Oswald

32.

A conventional good read is usually a bad read, a relaxing bath in what we know already. A true good read is surely an act of innovative creation in which we, the readers, become conspirators.

Bradbury, Malcolm

33.

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

34.

Books to judicious compilers, are useful; to particular arts and professions, they are absolutely necessary; to men of real science, they are tools: but more are tools to them.

Johnson

35.

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

Auden, W. H.

36.

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

Lichtenberg, Georg C.

37.

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

Millay, Edna St. Vincent

38.

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

Fuller, Margaret

39.

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

Harington, John

40.

A vacuum of ideas affects people differently than a vacuum of air, otherwise readers of books would be constantly collapsing.

Lichtenberg, Georg C.

41.

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

42.

Books are but waste paper unless we spend in action the wisdom we get from thought -- asleep. When we are weary of the living, we may repair to the dead, who have nothing of peevishness, pride, or design in their conversation.

Collier, Jeremy

43.

There is no robber worse than a bad book.

Proverb, Italian

44.

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

45.

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

46.

One half who graduate from college never read another book.

True, Herbert

47.

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

48.

The more sins you confess, the more books you will sell.

Proverb, American

49.

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

50.

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

Rohn, Jim