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

The age of the book is almost gone.

Steiner, George

Books are men of higher stature; the only men that speak aloud for future times to hear.

Barrett, E.S.

I know every book of mine by its smell, and I have but to put my nose between the pages to be reminded of all sorts of things.

Gissing, George Robert

We ought to reverence books; to look on them as useful and mighty things. If they are good and true, whether they are about religion, politics, farming, trade, law, or medicine, they are the message of Christ, the maker of all things -- the teacher of all truth.

Kingsley, Charles

Readers are plentiful: thinkers are rare.

Martineau, Harriet

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

Locke, John

The reason that fiction is more interesting than any other form of literature, to those who really like to study people, is that in fiction the author can really tell the truth without humiliating himself.

Roosevelt, Eleanor

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

Maugham, W. Somerset

Until it is kindled by a spirit as flamingly alive as the one which gave it birth a book is dead to us. Words divested of their magic are but dead hieroglyphs.

Miller, Henry

10.

A novel is a mirror carried along a main road.

Stendhal, Henri B.

11.

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

Montagu, Lady Mary Wortley

12.

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

Barstow, Stan

13.

Reading makes immigrants of us all. It takes us away from home, but more important, it finds homes for us everywhere.

Rochman, Hazel

14.

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

Lawrence, D. H.

15.

It does not follow because many books are written by persons born in America that there exists an American literature. Books which imitate or represent the thoughts and life of Europe do not constitute an American literature. Before such can exist, an original idea must animate this nation and fresh currents of life must call into life fresh thoughts along the shore.

Fuller, Margaret

16.

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

Fuller, Margaret

17.

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

18.

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

Ruskin, John

19.

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

20.

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

21.

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

22.

The lessons taught in great books are misleading. The commerce in life is rarely so simple and never so just.

Brookner, Anita

23.

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

Marcel, Anthony

24.

I am a part of everything that I have read.

Kieran, John

25.

A book that is shut is but a block.

Fuller, Thomas

26.

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

Brown, Les

27.

'Tis pleasant, sure, to see one's name in print; A book's a book, although there's nothing in it.

Byron, Lord

28.

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

Gibbon, Edward

29.

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

30.

I've never know any trouble than an hour's reading didn't assuage.

Secondat, Charles de

31.

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

Faulkner, William

32.

All good books are alike in that they are truer than if they had really happened and after you are finished reading one you will feel that all that happened to you and afterwards it all belongs to you; the good and the bad, the ecstasy, the remorse, and sorrow, the people and the places and how the weather was.

Hemingway, Ernest

33.

Books and marriage go ill together.

Moliere

34.

I suggest that the only books that influence us are those for which we are ready, and which have gone a little further down our particular path than we have yet got ourselves.

Forster, Edward M.

35.

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.

36.

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

37.

He had read much, if one considers his long life; but his contemplation was much more than his reading. He was wont to say that if he had read as much as other men he should have known no more than other men.

Aubrey, John

38.

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

Bach, Richard

39.

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

40.

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

Harington, John

41.

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

42.

Digressions, incontestably, are the sunshine; they are the life, the soul of reading! Take them out of this book, for instance, --you might as well take the book along with them; --one cold external winter would reign in every page of it; restore them to the writer; --he steps forth like a bridegroom, --bids All-hail; brings in variety, and forbids the appetite to fail.

Sterne, Laurence

43.

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

Mansfield, Katherine

44.

All the best stories in the world are but one story in reality -- the story of escape. It is the only thing which interests us all and at all times, how to escape.

Benson, Arthur Christopher

45.

The last thing one discovers in composing a work is what to put first.

Pascal, Blaise

46.

One always tends to overpraise a long book, because one has got through it.

Forster, Edward M.

47.

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

Millay, Edna St. Vincent

48.

Books are the blessed chloroform of the mind.