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

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

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

Lichtenberg, Georg C.

There is more treasure in books than in all the pirates loot on Treasure Island and best of all, you can enjoy these riches every day of your life.

Disney, Walt

I know every book of mine by its smell, and I have but to put my nose between the pages to be reminded of all sorts of things.

Gissing, George Robert

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

Proverb, American

Most books, like their authors, are born to die; of only a few books can it be said that death has no dominion over them; they live, and their influence lives forever.

Swartz, J.

The lessons taught in great books are misleading. The commerce in life is rarely so simple and never so just.

Brookner, Anita

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

Hope, Anthony

Reading makes immigrants of us all. It takes us away from home, but more important, it finds homes for us everywhere.

Rochman, Hazel

10.

Read nothing that you do not care to remember, and remember nothing you do not mean to use.

Blackie, Professor

11.

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

Chamfort, Sebastien-Roch Nicolas De

12.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

13.

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

14.

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

Fuller, Margaret

15.

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

Mcluhan, Marshall

16.

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

Temple, Sir William

17.

Fiction reveals truth that reality obscures.

West, Jessamyn

18.

Tradition is but a meteor, which, if it once falls, cannot be rekindled. Memory, once interrupted, is not to be recalled. But written learning is a fixed luminary, which, after the cloud that had hidden it has passed away, is again bright in its proper station. So books are faithful repositories, which may be awhile neglected or forgotten, but when opened again, will again impart instruction.

Johnson

19.

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

Lichtenberg, Georg C.

20.

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

Pound, Ezra

21.

Books are the bees which carry the quickening pollen from one to another mind.

Lowell, James Russell

22.

Footnotes are the finer-suckered surfaces that allow testicular paragraphs to hold fast to the wider reality of the library.

Baker, Nicholson

23.

Books are lighthouses erected in the great sea of time.

Whipple, Edwin P.

24.

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

25.

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

Marcel, Anthony

26.

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

Vaneigem, Raoul

27.

From the moment I picked your book up until I laid it down I was convulsed with laughter. Some day I intend reading it.

Marx, Groucho

28.

A novel is a mirror carried along a main road.

Stendhal, Henri B.

29.

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

30.

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

31.

The successful Accelerated Reader is able to read larger than normal blocks or bites of the printed page with each eye stop. He has accepted, without reservation, the philosophy that the most important benefit of reading is the gaining of information, ideas, mental picture and entertainment-not the fretting over words. He has come to the realization that words in and of themselves are for the most part insignificant.

Cutler, Wade E.

32.

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

33.

Books are not men and yet they stay alive.

Benet, Stephen Vincent

34.

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.

35.

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

36.

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

Disraeli, Benjamin

37.

What is a diary as a rule? A document useful to the person who keeps it. Dull to the contemporary who reads it and invaluable to the student, centuries afterwards, who treasures it.

Terry, Helen

38.

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

Asimov, Isaac

39.

When I am dead, I hope it may be said: His sins were scarlet, but his books were read.

Belloc, Hilaire

40.

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

Mencken, H. L.

41.

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

Byron, Lord

42.

Every abridgement of a good book is a fool abridged.

Montaigne, Michel Eyquem De

43.

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

44.

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

Millay, Edna St. Vincent

45.

The words of my book nothing, the drift of it everything.

Whitman, Walt

46.

The pleasure of reading is doubled when one lives with another who shares the same books.

Mansfield, Katherine

47.

I wish I could write a beautiful book to break those hearts that are soon to cease to exist: a book of faith and small neat worlds and of people who live by the philosophies of popular songs.

48.

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

49.

A wicked book cannot repent.

Proverb

50.

My books are water; those of the great geniuses are wine -- everybody drinks water.

Twain, Mark