Motivational Quotes

Books - reading

When I am dead, I hope it may be said: His sins were scarlet, but his books were read.

- Belloc, Hilaire

Best Quotes about Books - reading

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

The book you don't read won't help.

Rohn, Jim

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

Luther, Martin

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

Whitman, Walt

What is important is not to be able to read rapidly, but to be able to decide what not to read.

Mccay, James T.

I always like to look on the optimistic side of life, but I am realistic enough to know that life is a complex matter.

Disney, Walt

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.

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

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

Vaneigem, Raoul

10.

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

11.

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

Lee, Harper

12.

The reason a writer writes a book is to forget a book and the reason a reader reads one is to remember it.

Wolfe, Thomas

13.

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

14.

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

15.

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

16.

With one day's reading a man may have the key in his hands.

Pound, Ezra

17.

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

Colton, Charles Caleb

18.

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

19.

The oldest books are still only just out to those who have not read them.

Butler, Samuel

20.

The books that the world calls immoral are the books that show the world its own shame.

Wilde, Oscar

21.

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

Coolio

22.

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

23.

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

24.

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

Hope, Anthony

25.

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

26.

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

27.

My books kept me from the ring, the dog-pit, the tavern, and the saloon.

Hood, Thomas

28.

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

Fuller, Margaret

29.

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

30.

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

31.

Old books that have ceased to be of service should no more be abandoned than should old friends who have ceased to give pleasure.

Worsthorne, Sir Peregrine

32.

A library is thought in cold storage.

Samuel, Herbert

33.

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

34.

There is no robber worse than a bad book.

Proverb, Italian

35.

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

Sandwell, B. K.

36.

Every abridgement of a good book is a fool abridged.

Montaigne, Michel Eyquem De

37.

Beware of the person of one book.

Aquinas, St. Thomas

38.

Fiction reveals truth that reality obscures.

West, Jessamyn

39.

Books in a large university library system: 2, 000,000. Books in an average large city library: 1 0,000. Average number of books in a chain bookstore: 30, 000. Books in an average neighborhood branch library: 20, 000.

Horowitz, Lois

40.

No entertainment is so cheap as reading, nor is any pleasure so lasting.

Montagu, Lady Mary Wortley

41.

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

42.

If a secret history of books could be written, and the author's private thoughts and meanings noted down alongside of his story, how many insipid volumes would become interesting, and dull tales excite the reader!

Thackeray, William M.

43.

No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader.

Frost, Robert

44.

We should be as careful of the books we read, as of the company we keep. The dead very often have more power than the living.

Edwards, Tryon

45.

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

46.

No man understands a deep book until he has seen and lived at least part of its contents.

Pound, Ezra

47.

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

48.

Reading the Scriptures is an uplifting experience.

49.

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

Disraeli, Benjamin

50.

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

Hugo, Victor