Motivational Quotes

Books - reading

Books are not men and yet they stay alive.

- Benet, Stephen Vincent

Best Quotes about Books - reading

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

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 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

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

Maclennan, Hugh

Readers are plentiful: thinkers are rare.

Martineau, Harriet

Do we write books so that they shall merely be read? Don't we also write them for employment in the household? For one that is read from start to finish, thousands are leafed through, other thousands lie motionless, others are jammed against mouseholes, thrown at rats, others are stood on, sat on, drummed on, have gingerbread baked on them or are used to light pipes.

Lichtenberg, Georg C.

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

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

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

Brodsky, Joseph

10.

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

Lawrence, D. H.

11.

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

Shaw, George Bernard

12.

Thank you for sending me a copy of your book -- I'll waste no time reading it.

Hadas, Moses

13.

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

Spielberg, Steven

14.

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

Pound, Ezra

15.

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

Ruskin, John

16.

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

17.

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

18.

Miss a meal if you have to, but don't miss a book.

Rohn, Jim

19.

A good title is the title of a successful book.

Chandler, Raymond

20.

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

21.

A book may be compared to your neighbor: if it be good, it cannot last too long; if bad, you cannot get rid of it too early.

Brooke, Rupert

22.

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

23.

Books are lighthouses erected in the great sea of time.

Whipple, Edwin P.

24.

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

25.

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

Parker, Dorothy

26.

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

Mccay, James T.

27.

When a book raises your spirit, and inspires you with noble and manly thoughts, seek for no other test of its excellence. It is good, and made by a good workman.

Bruyere, Jean De La

28.

Readers are less and less seen as mere non-writers, the subhuman other or flawed derivative of the author; the lack of a pen is no longer a shameful mark of secondary status but a positively enabling space, just as within every writer can be seen to lurk, as a repressed but contaminating antithesis, a reader.

Eagleton, Terry

29.

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

Montagu, Lady Mary Wortley

30.

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''

31.

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

32.

Some books leave us free and some books make us free.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

33.

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

Secondat, Charles de

34.

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

Vaneigem, Raoul

35.

The books that everybody admires are those that nobody reads.

France, Anatole

36.

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

37.

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.

38.

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

Proverb, American

39.

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

40.

The Bible remained for me a book of books, still divine -- but divine in the sense that all great books are divine which teach men how to live righteously.

Keith, Sir Arthur

41.

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

Gibbon, Edward

42.

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

43.

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

44.

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

Coolio

45.

Some of the most famous books are the least worth reading. Their fame was due to their having done something that needed to be doing in their day. The work is done and the virtue of the book has expired.

Morely, John

46.

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

Mcluhan, Marshall

47.

The books one reads in childhood, and perhaps most of all the bad and good bad books, create in one's mind a sort of false map of the world, a series of fabulous countries into which one can retreat at odd moments throughout the rest of life, and which in some cases can survive a visit to the real countries which they are supposed to represent.

Orwell, George

48.

A book is like a man -- clever and dull, brave and cowardly, beautiful and ugly. For every flowering thought there will be a page like a wet and mangy mongrel, and for every looping flight a tap on the wing and a reminder that wax cannot hold the feathers firm too near the sun.

Steinbeck, John

49.

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

50.

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

Lowell, James Russell