Motivational Quotes

Books - reading

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

Best Quotes about Books - reading

Americans will listen, but they do not care to read. War and Peace must wait for the leisure of retirement, which never really comes: meanwhile it helps to furnish the living room. Blockbusting fiction is bought as furniture. Unread, it maintains its value. Read, it looks like money wasted. Cunningly, Americans know that books contain a person, and they want the person, not the book.

Burgess, Anthony

The great American novel has not only already been written, it has already been rejected.

Dane, Frank

The classics are only primitive literature. They belong to the same class as primitive machinery and primitive music and primitive medicine.

Leacock, Stephen B.

Every abridgement of a good book is a fool abridged.

Montaigne, Michel Eyquem De

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

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

Coolio

In science read the newest works, in literature read the oldest.

Bulwer-Lytton, Edward G.

She could give herself up to the written word as naturally as a good dancer to music or a fine swimmer to water. The only difficulty was that after finishing the last sentence she was left with a feeling at once hollow and uncomfortably full. Exactly like indigestion.

Rhys, Jean

Today a reader, tomorrow a leader.

Fusselman, W.

10.

The multitude of books is a great evil. There is no limit to this fever for writing.

Luther, Martin

11.

I feel like I'm drowning. Every night, I'm carrying home loads of things to read but I'm too exhausted. I keep clipping things and Xeroxing them and planning to read them eventually, but I just end up throwing it all away and feeling guilty.

Levine, Ghita

12.

A bad book is as much of a labor to write as a good one; it comes as sincerely from the author's soul.

Huxley, Aldous

13.

A multitude of books distracts the mind.

Socrates

14.

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

15.

No one can read with profit that which he cannot learn to read with pleasure.

Porter, Noah

16.

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

17.

I am what libraries and librarians have made me, with little assistance from a professor of Greek and poets.

Sandwell, B. K.

18.

The reading of all good books is like a conversation with all the finest men of past centuries.

Descartes, Rene

19.

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

Schopenhauer, Arthur

20.

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

21.

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

22.

The best effect of any book, is that it excites the reader to self-activity.

Carlyle, Thomas

23.

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

Gibbon, Edward

24.

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

Gibbon, Edward

25.

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

Chesterton, Gilbert K.

26.

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

Fuller, Margaret

27.

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.

28.

Readers are plentiful: thinkers are rare.

Martineau, Harriet

29.

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

Maclennan, Hugh

30.

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

31.

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''

32.

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

Schopenhauer, Arthur

33.

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

Howells, William Dean

34.

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

Wesley, John

35.

Book love... is your pass to the greatest, the purest, and the most perfect pleasure that God has prepared for His creatures.

Trollope, Anthony

36.

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

37.

What is the most precious, the most exciting smell awaiting you in the house when you return to it after a dozen years or so? The smell of roses, you think? No, moldering books.

Sinyavsky, Andre

38.

The worst readers are those who behave like plundering troops: they take away a few things they can use, dirty and confound the remainder, and revile the whole.

Nietzsche, Friedrich

39.

In the dark colony of night, when I consider man's magnificent capacity for malice, madness, folly, envy, rage, and destructiveness, and I wonder whether we shall not end up as breakfast for newts and polyps, I seem to hear the muffled cries of all the words in all the books with covers closed.

Rosten, Leo

40.

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

41.

Books are not men and yet they stay alive.

Benet, Stephen Vincent

42.

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

Vaneigem, Raoul

43.

Surviving and thriving as a professional today demands two new approaches to the written word. First, it requires a new approach to orchestrating information, by skillfully choosing what to read and what to ignore. Second, it requires a new approach to integrating information, by reading faster and with greater comprehension.

Calano, Jimmy

44.

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

45.

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

46.

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

Forster, Edward M.

47.

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

Lowell, James Russell

48.

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

49.

In the case of good books, the point is not how many of them you can get through, but rather how many can get through to you.