Motivational Quotes

Books - reading

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

Best Quotes about Books - reading

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

Wesley, John

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

Ruskin, John

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

Spielberg, Steven

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

If I had my way books would not be written in English, but in an exceedingly difficult secret language that only skilled professional readers and story-tellers could interpret. Then people like you would have to go to public halls and pay good prices to hear the professionals decode and read the books aloud for you. This plan would have the advantage of scaring off all amateur authors, retired politicians, country doctors and I-Married-a-Midget writers who would not have the patience to learn the secret language.

Davies, Robertson

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

Locke, John

The flood of print has turned reading into a process of gulping rather than savoring

Chappell, Warren

This book is not to be tossed lightly aside, but to be hurled with great force.

Parker, Dorothy

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

10.

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

11.

No man understands a deep book until he has seen and lived at least part of its contents.

Pound, Ezra

12.

With one day's reading a man may have the key in his hands.

Pound, Ezra

13.

One sheds one's sicknesses in books -- repeats and presents again one's emotions, to be master of them.

Lawrence, D. H.

14.

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

15.

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

16.

A successful book cannot afford to be more than ten percent new.

Mcluhan, Marshall

17.

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

18.

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

Shaw, George Bernard

19.

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

20.

There is no such thing as a moral book or an immoral book. Books are well written or badly written. That is all.

Wilde, Oscar

21.

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

Holmes, Oliver Wendell

22.

There are two kinds of books. Those that no one reads and those that no one ought to read.

Mencken, H. L.

23.

Every man is a volume if you know how to read him.

Channing, William Ellery

24.

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

25.

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

26.

The reason that fiction is more interesting than any other form of literature, to those who really like to study people, is that in fiction the author can really tell the truth without humiliating himself.

Roosevelt, Eleanor

27.

Everything in the world exists to end up in a book.

Mallarme, Stephane

28.

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

Hugo, Victor

29.

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

Mencken, H. L.

30.

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

31.

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

Tupper, Martin

32.

Digressions, incontestably, are the sunshine; they are the life, the soul of reading! Take them out of this book, for instance, --you might as well take the book along with them; --one cold external winter would reign in every page of it; restore them to the writer; --he steps forth like a bridegroom, --bids All-hail; brings in variety, and forbids the appetite to fail.

Sterne, Laurence

33.

A wicked book cannot repent.

Proverb

34.

Books are but waste paper unless we spend in action the wisdom we get from thought -- asleep. When we are weary of the living, we may repair to the dead, who have nothing of peevishness, pride, or design in their conversation.

Collier, Jeremy

35.

Read as you taste fruit or savor wine, or enjoy friendship, love or life.

Jackson, Holbrook

36.

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

Murray, William

37.

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

Adler, Mortimer J.

38.

I suggest that the only books that influence us are those for which we are ready, and which have gone a little further down our particular path than we have yet got ourselves.

Forster, Edward M.

39.

A multitude of books distracts the mind.

Socrates

40.

Once we have learned to read, meaning of words can somehow register without consciousness.

Marcel, Anthony

41.

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

42.

A book might be written on the injustice of the just.

Hope, Anthony

43.

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

44.

When I get a little money, I buy books; and if any is left I buy food and clothes.

Erasmus, Desiderius

45.

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

Frost, Robert

46.

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.

47.

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

48.

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

49.

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''

50.

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

Rohn, Jim