Motivational Quotes

Books - reading

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

Best Quotes about Books - reading

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

Parker, Dorothy

All my good reading, you might say, was done in the toilet. There are passages in Ulysses which can be read only in the toilet -- if one wants to extract the full flavor of their content.

Miller, Henry

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

Blackie, Professor

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

Harington, John

All the known world, excepting only savage nations, is governed by books.

Voltaire

A multitude of books distracts the mind.

Socrates

The reading or non-reading a book will never keep down a single petticoat.

Byron, Lord

Learning to read has been reduced to a process of mastering a series of narrow, specific, hierarchical skills. Where armed-forces recruits learn the components of a rifle or the intricacies of close order drill by the numbers, recruits to reading learn its mechanics sound by sound and word by word.

Gross, Jacquelyn

I feel a kind of reverence for the first books of young authors. There is so much aspiration in them, so much audacious hope and trembling fear, so much of the heart's history, that all errors and shortcomings are for a while lost sight of in the amiable self assertion of youth.

Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth

10.

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

11.

The printing press is either the greatest blessing or the greatest curse of modern times, sometimes one forgets which it is.

Barrie, Sir James M.

12.

One half who graduate from college never read another book.

True, Herbert

13.

A dose of poison can do its work but once. A bad book can go on poisoning minds for generations.

Murray, William

14.

Books succeed, and lives fail.

Browning, Elizabeth Barrett

15.

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

16.

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

Asimov, Isaac

17.

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

18.

The real risks for any artist are taken in pushing the work to the limits of what is possible, in the attempt to increase the sum of what it is possible to think. Books become good when they go to this edge and risk falling over it --when they endanger the artist by reason of what he has, or has not, artistically dared.

Rushdie, Salman

19.

A wicked book cannot repent.

Proverb

20.

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

21.

There is no robber worse than a bad book.

Proverb, Italian

22.

The good of a book lies in its being read. A book is made up of signs that speak of other signs, which in their turn speak of things. Without an eye to read them, a book contains signs that produce no concepts; therefore it is dumb.

Eco, Umberto

23.

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

Wycherley, William

24.

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

Schopenhauer, Arthur

25.

A big leather-bound volume makes an ideal razor strap. A thin book is useful to stick under a table with a broken caster to steady it. A large, flat atlas can be used to cover a window with a broken pane. And a thick, old-fashioned heavy book with a clasp is the finest thing in the world to throw at a noisy cat.

Twain, Mark

26.

You can either read something many times in order to be assured that you got it all, or else you can define your purpose and use techniques which will assure that you have met it and gotten what you need.

Kump, Peter

27.

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

Auden, W. H.

28.

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

Marcel, Anthony

29.

Then I though of reading -- the nice and subtle happiness of reading ... this joy not dulled by age, this polite and unpunishable vice, this selfish, serene, lifelong intoxication.

Smith, Logan Pearsall

30.

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

Forster, Edward M.

31.

Except a living man there is nothing more wonderful than a book! a message to us from the dead -- from human souls we never saw, who lived, perhaps, thousands of miles away. And yet these, in those little sheets of paper, speak to us, arouse us, terrify us, teach us, comfort us, open their hearts to us as brothers.

Kingsley, Charles

32.

A library is thought in cold storage.

Samuel, Herbert

33.

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

Hope, Anthony

34.

Who ever converses among old books will be hard to please among the new.

Temple, Sir William

35.

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

Rohn, Jim

36.

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.

37.

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

Mcluhan, Marshall

38.

Prerequisite for rereadability in books: that they be forgettable.

Rostand, Jean

39.

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

40.

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

Montagu, Lady Mary Wortley

41.

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

42.

Many books require no thought from those who read them, and for a very simple reason: they made no such demand upon those who wrote them. Those works, therefore, are the most valuable, that set our thinking faculties in the fullest operation. understand them.

Clarendon

43.

The books one has written in the past have two surprises in store: one couldn't write them again, and wouldn't want to.

Rostand, Jean

44.

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

Barstow, Stan

45.

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

46.

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

47.

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

48.

This will never be a civilized country until we expend more money for books than we do for chewing gum.

Hubbard, Elbert

49.

Of all the ways of acquiring books, writing them oneself is regarded as the most praiseworthy method. Writers are really people who write books not because they are poor, but because they are dissatisfied with the books which they could buy but do not like.

Benjamin, Walter

50.

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

Schopenhauer, Arthur