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

Don't just read the easy stuff. You may be entertained by it, but you will never grow from it.

Rohn, Jim

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

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

No furniture is so charming as books.

Smith, Sydney

Reading is to the mind what exercise is to the body. It is wholesome and bracing for the mind to have its faculties kept on the stretch.

Steele, Sir Richard

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

Ruskin, John

The book to read is not the one which thinks for you, but the one which makes you think. No book in the world equals the Bible for that.

Mccosh

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

The chief knowledge that a man gets from reading books is the knowledge that very few of them are worth reading.

Mencken, H. L.

10.

If a book comes from the heart it will contrive to reach other hearts. All art and author craft are of small account to that.

Carlyle, Thomas

11.

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

Maclennan, Hugh

12.

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

13.

Old books, you know well, are books of the world's youth, and new books are the fruits of its age.

Holmes, Oliver Wendell

14.

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

Hubbard, Elbert

15.

A good title is the title of a successful book.

Chandler, Raymond

16.

A wicked book cannot repent.

Proverb

17.

Everywhere I have sought rest and not found it, except sitting in a corner by myself with a little book.

Kempis, Thomas

18.

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

19.

The things I want to know are in books; my best friend is the man who'll get me a book I ain't read.

Lincoln, Abraham

20.

You will, I am sure, agree with me that... if page 534 only finds us in the second chapter, the length of the first one must have been really intolerable.

Doyle, Sir Arthur Conan

21.

Here, my dear Lucy, hide these books. Quick, quick! Fling Peregrine Pickle under the toilette --throw Roderick Random into the closet --put The Innocent Adultery into The Whole Duty of Man; thrust Lord Aimworth under the sofa! cram Ovid behind the bolster; there --put The Man of Feeling into your pocket. Now for them.

Sheridan, Richard Brinsley

22.

Beware you be not swallowed up in books! An ounce of love is worth a pound of knowledge.

Wesley, John

23.

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

Tupper, Martin

24.

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

Mccay, James T.

25.

A book that is shut is but a block.

Fuller, Thomas

26.

Next, in importance to books are their titles.

Davies, Paul

27.

Books are not men and yet they stay alive.

Benet, Stephen Vincent

28.

Who kills a man kills a reasonable creature, God's image, but thee who destroys a good book, kills reason itself.

Milton, John

29.

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

Brodsky, Joseph

30.

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

31.

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

32.

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

33.

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

Rohn, Jim

34.

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

35.

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

Auden, W. H.

36.

There are people who read too much: bibliobibuli. I know some who are constantly drunk on books, as other men are drunk on whiskey or religion. They wander through this most diverting and stimulating of worlds in a haze, seeing nothing and hearing nothing.

Mencken, H. L.

37.

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

38.

Books are the best of things if well used; if abused, among the worst. They are good for nothing but to inspire. I had better never see a book than be warped by its attraction clean out of my own orbit, and made a satellite instead of a system.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

39.

Books had instant replay long before televised sports.

Williams, Bert

40.

To learn to read is to light a fire; every syllable that is spelled out is a spark.

Hugo, Victor

41.

Tradition is but a meteor, which, if it once falls, cannot be rekindled. Memory, once interrupted, is not to be recalled. But written learning is a fixed luminary, which, after the cloud that had hidden it has passed away, is again bright in its proper station. So books are faithful repositories, which may be awhile neglected or forgotten, but when opened again, will again impart instruction.

Johnson

42.

A house without books is like a room without windows. No man has a right to bring up his children without surrounding them with books, if he has the means to buy them. It is a wrong to his family. Children learn to read by being in the presence of books. The love of knowledge comes with reading and grows upon it. And the love of knowledge, in a young mind, is almost always a warrant against the inferior excitement of passions and vices.

Mann, Horace

43.

We are too civil to books. For a few golden sentences we will turn over and actually read a volume of four or five hundred pages.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

44.

Books are lighthouses erected in the great sea of time.

Whipple, Edwin P.

45.

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

46.

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

Temple, Sir William

47.

There was a time when the world acted on books; now books act on the world.

Joubert, Joseph

48.

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

49.

The words of my book nothing, the drift of it everything.

Whitman, Walt

50.

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