Motivational Quotes

Books - reading

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

Best Quotes about Books - reading

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.

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

Wesley, John

Without books the development of civilization would have been impossible. They are the engines of change, windows on the world, Lighthouses as the poet said erected in the sea of time. They are companions, teachers, magicians, bankers of the treasures of the mind, Books are humanity in print.

Schopenhauer, Arthur

Beware of the person of one book.

Aquinas, St. Thomas

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

Disraeli, Benjamin

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

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

Frost, Robert

A person who publishes a book appears willfully in public with his pants down.

Millay, Edna St. Vincent

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''

10.

The books that the world calls immoral are the books that show the world its own shame.

Wilde, Oscar

11.

Books are not absolutely dead things, but do contain a certain potency of life in them, to be as active as the soul whose progeny they are; they preserve, as in a vial, the purest efficacy and extraction of the living intellect that bred them.

Milton, John

12.

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

13.

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

14.

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

Ruskin, John

15.

There is creative reading as well as creative writing.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

16.

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

Schopenhauer, Arthur

17.

How can you dare teach a man to read until you've taught him everything else first?

Shaw, George Bernard

18.

A good book, in the language of the book-sellers, is a salable one; in that of the curious, a scarce one; in that of men of sense, a useful and instructive one.

Chambers, Oswald

19.

Hypocrite reader -- my fellow -- my brother!

Baudelaire, Charles

20.

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

Rohn, Jim

21.

Only a generation of readers will span a generation of writers.

Spielberg, Steven

22.

Fiction reveals truth that reality obscures.

West, Jessamyn

23.

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

24.

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

Descartes, Rene

25.

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

26.

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

Chamfort, Sebastien-Roch Nicolas De

27.

Our high respect for a well read person is praise enough for literature.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

28.

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

29.

I always begin at the left with the opening word of the sentence and read toward the right and I recommend this method.

Thurber, James

30.

Books are masters who instruct us without rods or ferules, without words or anger, without bread or money. If you approach them, they are not asleep; if you seek them, they do not hide; if you blunder, they do not scold; if you are ignorant, they do not laugh at you.

Bury, Richard De

31.

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

32.

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

Schopenhauer, Arthur

33.

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

34.

A wicked book cannot repent.

Proverb

35.

Next to acquiring good friends, the best acquisition is that of good books.

Colton, Charles Caleb

36.

The more sins you confess, the more books you will sell.

Proverb, American

37.

What gunpowder did for war the printing press has done for the mind.

Phillips, Wendell

38.

All good books are alike in that they are truer than if they had really happened and after you are finished reading one you will feel that all that happened to you and afterwards it all belongs to you; the good and the bad, the ecstasy, the remorse, and sorrow, the people and the places and how the weather was.

Hemingway, Ernest

39.

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

Vaneigem, Raoul

40.

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

Asimov, Isaac

41.

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

42.

After all, the world is not a stage -- not to me: nor a theatre: nor a show-house of any sort. And art, especially novels, are not little theatres where the reader sits aloft and watches... and sighs, commiserates, condones and smiles. That's what you want a book to be: because it leaves you so safe and superior, with your two-dollar ticket to the show. And that's what my books are not and never will be. Whoever reads me will be in the thick of the scrimmage, and if he doesn't like it -- if he wants a safe seat in the audience -- let him read someone else.

Lawrence, D. H.

43.

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

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.

A novel is never anything, but a philosophy put into images.

Camus, Albert

46.

Prerequisite for rereadability in books: that they be forgettable.

Rostand, Jean

47.

A conventional good read is usually a bad read, a relaxing bath in what we know already. A true good read is surely an act of innovative creation in which we, the readers, become conspirators.

Bradbury, Malcolm

48.

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

49.

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

50.

Old books that have ceased to be of service should no more be abandoned than should old friends who have ceased to give pleasure.

Worsthorne, Sir Peregrine