Motivational Quotes

Books - reading

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

Best Quotes about Books - reading

My books kept me from the ring, the dog-pit, the tavern, and the saloon.

Hood, Thomas

The unread story is not a story; it is little black marks on wood pulp. The reader, reading it, makes it live: a live thing, a story.

Guin, Ursula K. Le

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

Some books leave us free and some books make us free.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

Some of the most famous books are the least worth reading. Their fame was due to their having done something that needed to be doing in their day. The work is done and the virtue of the book has expired.

Morely, John

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

Morely, John

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

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

Bevan, Aneurin

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

Frost, Robert

10.

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

Schopenhauer, Arthur

11.

Books are not men and yet they stay alive.

Benet, Stephen Vincent

12.

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

13.

The books that everybody admires are those that nobody reads.

France, Anatole

14.

'Tis the good reader that makes the good book; in every book he finds passages which seem to be confidences or sides hidden from all else and unmistakably meant for his ear; the profit of books is according to the sensibility of the reader; the profound thought or passion sleeps as in a mine, until it is discovered by an equal mind and heart.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

15.

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

Johnson, Samuel

16.

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

Holmes, Oliver Wendell

17.

A dose of poison can do its work but once. A bad book can go on poisoning minds for generations.

Murray, William

18.

Books to judicious compilers, are useful; to particular arts and professions, they are absolutely necessary; to men of real science, they are tools: but more are tools to them.

Johnson

19.

Readers are less and less seen as mere non-writers, the subhuman other or flawed derivative of the author; the lack of a pen is no longer a shameful mark of secondary status but a positively enabling space, just as within every writer can be seen to lurk, as a repressed but contaminating antithesis, a reader.

Eagleton, Terry

20.

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

21.

The printing press is either the greatest blessing or the greatest curse of modern times, sometimes one forgets which it is.

Barrie, Sir James M.

22.

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

Asimov, Isaac

23.

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

24.

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

Luther, Martin

25.

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.

26.

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

27.

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

Fuller, Margaret

28.

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

Faulkner, William

29.

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

Spielberg, Steven

30.

There is creative reading as well as creative writing.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

31.

A vacuum of ideas affects people differently than a vacuum of air, otherwise readers of books would be constantly collapsing.

Lichtenberg, Georg C.

32.

Much reading is an oppression of the mind, and extinguishes the natural candle, which is the reason of so many senseless scholars in the world.

Penn, William

33.

The newest books are those that never grow old.

Jackson, George Holbrook

34.

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

35.

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.

36.

Many books require no thought from those who read them, and for a very simple reason: they made no such demand upon those who wrote them. Those works, therefore, are the most valuable, that set our thinking faculties in the fullest operation. understand them.

Clarendon

37.

Thank you for sending me a copy of your book -- I'll waste no time reading it.

Hadas, Moses

38.

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

Ruskin, John

39.

A wicked book cannot repent.

Proverb

40.

Begin to read a book that will help you move toward your dream.

Brown, Les

41.

A multitude of books distracts the mind.

Socrates

42.

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

43.

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

44.

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

45.

People are much more willing to lend you books than bookcases.

Twain, Mark

46.

Fiction reveals truth that reality obscures.

West, Jessamyn

47.

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

Rohn, Jim

48.

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

49.

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

50.

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