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

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

Johnson, Samuel

A good title is the title of a successful book.

Chandler, Raymond

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

Books are the best of things if well used; if abused, among the worst. They are good for nothing but to inspire. I had better never see a book than be warped by its attraction clean out of my own orbit, and made a satellite instead of a system.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

This will never be a civilized country until we expend more money for books than we do for chewing gum.

Hubbard, Elbert

Everything in this book may be wrong. [The Savior's Manual]

Bach, Richard

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

Jackson, Holbrook

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

Chappell, Warren

It is from books that wise people derive consolation in the troubles of life.

Hugo, Victor

10.

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

Faulkner, William

11.

When we read a story, we inhabit it. The covers of the book are like a roof and four walls. What is to happen next will take place within the four walls of the story. And this is possible because the story's voice makes everything its own.

Berger, John

12.

Who ever converses among old books will be hard to please among the new.

Temple, Sir William

13.

Five daily newspapers arrive in my California driveway. The New York times and the Wall Street Journal are supplemented by three local papers. As for magazines, I read, or at least skim, Business Week, Forbes, The Economist, INC; Industry Week, Fortune. Other subscriptions include Sales and Marketing Management, Modern Health Care, Progressive Grocer, High Tech Business, and Slaon Management Review from MIT. I religiously read Business Tokyo, Asia Week, and Far Eastern Economic Review. I glance at Newsweek and Time ... but I devour the New Republic, Policy Review, Foreign Affairs, The Washington Monthly, and Public Interest. How about books? A dozen or more each month.

Peters, Thomas J.

14.

He had read much, if one considers his long life; but his contemplation was much more than his reading. He was wont to say that if he had read as much as other men he should have known no more than other men.

Aubrey, John

15.

The newest books are those that never grow old.

Jackson, George Holbrook

16.

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

Barrett, E.S.

17.

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

18.

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

Maclennan, Hugh

19.

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

Porter, Noah

20.

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

Marcel, Anthony

21.

Books give not wisdom where none was before. But where some is, there reading makes it more.

Harington, John

22.

We are too civil to books. For a few golden sentences we will turn over and actually read a volume of four or five hundred pages.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

23.

Somewhere, everywhere, now hidden, now apparent in what ever is written down, is the form of a human being. If we seek to know him, are we idly occupied?

Woolf, Virginia

24.

There are very many people who read simply to prevent themselves from thinking.

Lichtenberg, Georg C.

25.

Here, my dear Lucy, hide these books. Quick, quick! Fling Peregrine Pickle under the toilette --throw Roderick Random into the closet --put The Innocent Adultery into The Whole Duty of Man; thrust Lord Aimworth under the sofa! cram Ovid behind the bolster; there --put The Man of Feeling into your pocket. Now for them.

Sheridan, Richard Brinsley

26.

Miss a meal if you have to, but don't miss a book.

Rohn, Jim

27.

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

Wilde, Oscar

28.

A novel points out that the world consists entirely of exceptions.

Carey, Joyce

29.

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

30.

An empty book is like an infant's soul, in which anything may be written. It is capable of all things, but containeth nothing. I have a mind to fill this with profitable wonders.

Traherne, Thomas

31.

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

32.

The power of a text is different when it is read from when it is copied out. Only the copied text thus commands the soul of him who is occupied with it, whereas the mere reader never discovers the new aspects of his inner self that are opened by the text, that road cut through the interior jungle forever closing behind it: because the reader follows the movement of his mind in the free flight of day-dreaming, whereas the copier submits it to command.

Benjamin, Walter

33.

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

34.

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

Chamfort, Sebastien-Roch Nicolas De

35.

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

Hugo, Victor

36.

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.

37.

Who kills a man kills a reasonable creature, God's image, but thee who destroys a good book, kills reason itself.

Milton, John

38.

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

39.

The reading or non-reading a book will never keep down a single petticoat.

Byron, Lord

40.

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.

41.

Today a reader, tomorrow a leader.

Fusselman, W.

42.

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

Forster, Edward M.

43.

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

44.

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

Mencken, H. L.

45.

After all manner of professors have done their best for us, the place we are to get knowledge is in books. The true university of these days is a collection of books.

Carlyle, Thomas

46.

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

Mencken, H. L.

47.

If a secret history of books could be written, and the author's private thoughts and meanings noted down alongside of his story, how many insipid volumes would become interesting, and dull tales excite the reader!

Thackeray, William M.

48.

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.

49.

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

Morely, John

50.

Fiction reveals truth that reality obscures.

West, Jessamyn