Motivational Quotes

Books - reading

When we read a story, we inhabit it. The covers of the book are like a roof and four walls. What is to happen next will take place within the four walls of the story. And this is possible because the story's voice makes everything its own.

- Berger, John

Best Quotes about Books - reading

A book that is shut is but a block.

Fuller, Thomas

Readers are plentiful: thinkers are rare.

Martineau, Harriet

A novel is a mirror carried along a main road.

Stendhal, Henri B.

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

Disraeli, Benjamin

Books are not men and yet they stay alive.

Benet, Stephen Vincent

The mere brute pleasure of reading --the sort of pleasure a cow must have in grazing.

Chesterton, Gilbert K.

Read as you taste fruit or savor wine, or enjoy friendship, love or life.

Jackson, Holbrook

When you have mastered numbers, you will in fact no longer be reading numbers, any more than you read words when reading books You will be reading meanings.

Geneen, Harold S.

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

10.

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

11.

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

Pascal, Blaise

12.

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

13.

The failure to read good books both enfeebles the vision and strengthens our most fatal tendency --the belief that the here and now is all there is.

Bloom, Allan

14.

I read the newspaper avidly. It is my one form of continuous fiction.

Bevan, Aneurin

15.

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''

16.

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

Temple, Sir William

17.

Don't ask me who's influenced me. A lion is made up of the lambs he's digested, and I've been reading all my life.

Seferis, Giorgos

18.

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.

19.

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

20.

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

21.

A book is a mirror: If an ass peers into it, you can't expect an apostle to look out.

Lichtenberg, Georg C.

22.

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

23.

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

24.

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

Pound, Ezra

25.

The most foolish kind of a book is a kind of leaky boat on the sea of wisdom; some of the wisdom will get in anyhow.

Holmes, Oliver Wendell

26.

There are very many people who read simply to prevent themselves from thinking.

Lichtenberg, Georg C.

27.

You will find most books worth reading are worth reading twice.

Morely, John

28.

The mortality of all inanimate things is terrible to me, but that of books most of all.

Howells, William Dean

29.

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

Faulkner, William

30.

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

31.

If I have not read a book before, it is, for all intents and purposes, new to me whether it was printed yesterday or three hundred years ago.

Hazlitt, William

32.

Most books today seemed to have been written overnight from books read the day before.

Chamfort, Sebastien-Roch Nicolas De

33.

A man ought to read just as his inclination leads him; for what he reads as a task will do him little good.

Johnson, Samuel

34.

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

35.

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

36.

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

Frost, Robert

37.

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

Butler, Samuel

38.

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

39.

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

Coolio

40.

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

Byron, Lord

41.

There is no robber worse than a bad book.

Proverb, Italian

42.

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

43.

A good book is the best of friends, the same today and for ever.

Tupper, Martin

44.

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

45.

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

Maugham, W. Somerset

46.

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

Mcluhan, Marshall

47.

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

Lee, Harper

48.

A book worth reading is worth buying.

Ruskin, John

49.

If I had my way books would not be written in English, but in an exceedingly difficult secret language that only skilled professional readers and story-tellers could interpret. Then people like you would have to go to public halls and pay good prices to hear the professionals decode and read the books aloud for you. This plan would have the advantage of scaring off all amateur authors, retired politicians, country doctors and I-Married-a-Midget writers who would not have the patience to learn the secret language.

Davies, Robertson

50.

The books we read should be chosen with great care, that they may be, as an Egyptian king wrote over his library, The medicines of the soul.

Hood, Paxton