Motivational Quotes

Books - reading

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

- Blackie, Professor

Best Quotes about Books - reading

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

Temple, Sir William

Fiction reveals truth that reality obscures.

West, Jessamyn

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 reason a writer writes a book is to forget a book and the reason a reader reads one is to remember it.

Wolfe, Thomas

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

Gibbon, Edward

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

Butler, Samuel

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

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

Read good, big important things.

Noonan, Peggy

10.

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

Mansfield, Katherine

11.

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

Joubert, Joseph

12.

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

13.

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

14.

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

Johnson, Samuel

15.

No matter how busy you may think you are, you must find time for reading, or surrender yourself to self-chosen ignorance.

Townsend, Atwood H.

16.

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

Howells, William Dean

17.

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

18.

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

Voltaire

19.

To sit alone in the lamplight with a book spread out before you hold intimate converse with men of unseen generations -- such is pleasure beyond compare.

Kenko, Yoshida

20.

A house is not a home unless it contains food and fire for the mind as well as the body.

Fuller, Margaret

21.

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

Baker, Nicholson

22.

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

Holmes, Oliver Wendell

23.

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

24.

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

25.

Prerequisite for rereadability in books: that they be forgettable.

Rostand, Jean

26.

Books constitute capital. A library book lasts as long as a house, for hundreds of years. It is not, then, an article of mere consumption but fairly of capital, and often in the case of professional men, setting out in life, it is their only capital.

Jefferson, Thomas

27.

Five daily newspapers arrive in my California driveway. The New York times and the Wall Street Journal are supplemented by three local papers. As for magazines, I read, or at least skim, Business Week, Forbes, The Economist, INC; Industry Week, Fortune. Other subscriptions include Sales and Marketing Management, Modern Health Care, Progressive Grocer, High Tech Business, and Slaon Management Review from MIT. I religiously read Business Tokyo, Asia Week, and Far Eastern Economic Review. I glance at Newsweek and Time ... but I devour the New Republic, Policy Review, Foreign Affairs, The Washington Monthly, and Public Interest. How about books? A dozen or more each month.

Peters, Thomas J.

28.

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

Lee, Harper

29.

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

30.

Reading is a basic tool in the living of a good life.

Adler, Mortimer J.

31.

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

32.

To feel most beautifully alive means to be reading something beautiful, ready always to apprehend in the flow of language the sudden flash of poetry.

Bachelard, Gaston

33.

Beware of the person of one book.

Aquinas, St. Thomas

34.

Books and marriage go ill together.

Moliere

35.

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

36.

No furniture is so charming as books.

Smith, Sydney

37.

Books are not men and yet they stay alive.

Benet, Stephen Vincent

38.

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

39.

Books had instant replay long before televised sports.

Williams, Bert

40.

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

Chesterton, Gilbert K.

41.

Reading furnishes the mind only with material for knowledge; it is thinking that makes what we read ours.

Locke, John

42.

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

43.

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

44.

A bibliophile of little means is likely to suffer often. Books don't slip from his hands but fly past him through the air, high as birds, high as prices.

Neruda, Pablo

45.

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

Montagu, Lady Mary Wortley

46.

He had read much, if one considers his long life; but his contemplation was much more than his reading. He was wont to say that if he had read as much as other men he should have known no more than other men.

Aubrey, John

47.

Books are those faithful mirrors that reflect to our mind the minds of sages and heroes.

Gibbon, Edward

48.

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

49.

I divide all readers into two classes: those who read to remember and those who read to forget.

Phelps, William Lyon

50.

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