Motivational Quotes

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

Best Quotes about Books - reading

The world of books is the most remarkable creation of man nothing else that he builds ever lasts monuments fall; nations perish; civilization grow old and die out; new races build others. But in the world of books are volumes that have seen this happen again and again and yet live on. Still young, still as fresh as the day they were written, still telling men's hearts, of the hearts of men centuries dead.

Day, Clarence

A book is a mirror: If an ass peers into it, you can't expect an apostle to look out.

Lichtenberg, Georg C.

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

Mencken, H. L.

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

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

Frost, Robert

A book is a part of life, a manifestation of life, just as much as a tree or a horse or a star. It obeys its own rhythms, its own laws, whether it be a novel, a play, or a diary. The deep, hidden rhythm of life is always there -- that of the pulse, the heart beat.

Miller, Henry

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

Schopenhauer, Arthur

Books are divided into two classes, the books of the hour and the books of all time.

Ruskin, John

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

10.

Readers are plentiful: thinkers are rare.

Martineau, Harriet

11.

In science, read by preference the newest works. In literature, read the oldest. The classics are always modern.

Lytton, Lord Edward

12.

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

Ruskin, John

13.

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

14.

The good of a book lies in its being read. A book is made up of signs that speak of other signs, which in their turn speak of things. Without an eye to read them, a book contains signs that produce no concepts; therefore it is dumb.

Eco, Umberto

15.

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

16.

There are worse crimes than burning books. One of them is not reading them.

Brodsky, Joseph

17.

The books one reads in childhood, and perhaps most of all the bad and good bad books, create in one's mind a sort of false map of the world, a series of fabulous countries into which one can retreat at odd moments throughout the rest of life, and which in some cases can survive a visit to the real countries which they are supposed to represent.

Orwell, George

18.

The Brahmins say that in their books there are many predictions of times in which it will rain. But press those books as strongly as you can, you can not get out of them a drop of water. So you can not get out of all the books that contain the best precepts the smallest good deed.

Tolstoy, Count Leo

19.

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

20.

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

21.

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

Leacock, Stephen B.

22.

The good parts of a book may be only something a writer is lucky enough to overhear or it may be the wreck of his whole damn life --and one is as good as the other.

Hemingway, Ernest

23.

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

24.

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

Phillips, Wendell

25.

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

Faulkner, William

26.

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

Hugo, Victor

27.

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

Brown, Les

28.

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

Mcluhan, Marshall

29.

Early in the morning, at break of day, in all the freshness and dawn of one's strength, to read a book --I call that vicious!

Nietzsche, Friedrich

30.

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

31.

I am a part of everything that I have read.

Kieran, John

32.

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

Bevan, Aneurin

33.

Books had instant replay long before televised sports.

Williams, Bert

34.

Read good, big important things.

Noonan, Peggy

35.

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

Erasmus, Desiderius

36.

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

Chappell, Warren

37.

One half who graduate from college never read another book.

True, Herbert

38.

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

Vaneigem, Raoul

39.

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

Trollope, Anthony

40.

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

Wesley, John

41.

Books are men of higher stature; the only men that speak aloud for future times to hear.

Barrett, E.S.

42.

Any book that helps a child to form a habit of reading, to make reading one of his deep and continuing needs, is good for him.

McKenna, Richard

43.

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

Luther, Martin

44.

If a book comes from the heart it will contrive to reach other hearts. All art and author craft are of small account to that.

Carlyle, Thomas

45.

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

46.

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

47.

Today a reader, tomorrow a leader.

Fusselman, W.

48.

Education... has produced a vast population able to read but unable to distinguish what is worth reading, an easy prey to sensations and cheap appeals.

Trevelyan, G. M.

49.

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

Twain, Mark

50.

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

Camus, Albert