Motivational Quotes

Books - reading

Books are not men and yet they stay alive.

- Benet, Stephen Vincent

Best Quotes about Books - reading

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

Beware of the person of one book.

Aquinas, St. Thomas

What we become depends on what we read after all the professors have finished with us. The greatest university of all is the collection of books.

Carlyle, Thomas

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

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

Mallarme, Stephane

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

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

Mcluhan, Marshall

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

Gibbon, Edward

There is a set of religious, or rather moral, writings which teach that virtue is the certain road to happiness, and vice to misery in this world. A very wholesome and comfortable doctrine, and to which we have but one objection, namely, that it is not true.

Fielding, Henry

10.

I can't bear art that you can walk round and admire. A book should be either a bandit or a rebel or a man in the crowd.

Lawrence, D. H.

11.

Today a reader, tomorrow a leader.

Fusselman, W.

12.

Books succeed, and lives fail.

Browning, Elizabeth Barrett

13.

Books and marriage go ill together.

Moliere

14.

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

15.

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

16.

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

17.

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.

18.

Books that you carry to the fire, and hold readily in your hand, are most useful after all.

Johnson, Samuel

19.

People are much more willing to lend you books than bookcases.

Twain, Mark

20.

There is no robber worse than a bad book.

Proverb, Italian

21.

It is books that teach us to refine our pleasures when young, and to recall them with satisfaction when we are old.

Hunt, Leigh

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.

You will be the same person in five as you are today except for the people you meet and the books you read.

Jones, Charles ''Tremendous''

24.

For a good book has this quality, that it is not merely a petrifaction of its author, but that once it has been tossed behind, like Deucalion's little stone, it acquires a separate and vivid life of its own.

Lejeune, Caroline

25.

Reading is equivalent to thinking with someone else's head instead of with one's own.

Schopenhauer, Arthur

26.

After all manner of professors have done their best for us, the place we are to get knowledge is in books. The true university of these days is a collection of books.

Carlyle, Thomas

27.

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

28.

Prerequisite for rereadability in books: that they be forgettable.

Rostand, Jean

29.

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

Mansfield, Katherine

30.

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

Ruskin, John

31.

The age of the book is almost gone.

Steiner, George

32.

Thy books should, like thy friends, not many be, yet such wherein men may thy judgment see.

Wycherley, William

33.

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

34.

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

Brookner, Anita

35.

The great American novel has not only already been written, it has already been rejected.

Dane, Frank

36.

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

37.

How can you dare teach a man to read until you've taught him everything else first?

Shaw, George Bernard

38.

A book worth reading is worth buying.

Ruskin, John

39.

To use books rightly, is to go to them for help; to appeal to them when our own knowledge and power fail; to be led by them into wider sight and purer conception than our own, and to receive from them the united sentence of the judges and councils of all time, against our solitary and unstable opinions.

Ruskin, John

40.

After all, the world is not a stage -- not to me: nor a theatre: nor a show-house of any sort. And art, especially novels, are not little theatres where the reader sits aloft and watches... and sighs, commiserates, condones and smiles. That's what you want a book to be: because it leaves you so safe and superior, with your two-dollar ticket to the show. And that's what my books are not and never will be. Whoever reads me will be in the thick of the scrimmage, and if he doesn't like it -- if he wants a safe seat in the audience -- let him read someone else.

Lawrence, D. H.

41.

This book is not to be tossed lightly aside, but to be hurled with great force.

Parker, Dorothy

42.

The newest books are those that never grow old.

Jackson, George Holbrook

43.

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

Baker, Nicholson

44.

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

45.

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

Blackie, Professor

46.

I am a part of everything that I have read.

Kieran, John

47.

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

48.

Only a generation of readers will span a generation of writers.

Spielberg, Steven

49.

Readers are plentiful: thinkers are rare.

Martineau, Harriet

50.

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

Hood, Thomas