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

Readers are plentiful: thinkers are rare.

Martineau, Harriet

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

How many a man has dated a new era in his life from the reading of a book! The book exists for us, perchance, that will explain our miracles and reveal new ones. The at present unutterable things we may find somewhere uttered.

Thoreau, Henry David

He has only half learned the art of reading who has not added to it the more refined art of skipping and skimming.

Balfour, Arthur James

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

A good book is the very essence of a good man. His virtues survive in it, while the foibles and faults of his actual life are forgotten. All the goodly company of the excellent and great sit around my table, or look down on me from yonder shelves, waiting patiently to answer my questions and enrich me with their wisdom. A precious book is a foretaste of immortality.

Cuyler, Theodore L.

The great American novel has not only already been written, it has already been rejected.

Dane, Frank

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

Belloc, Hilaire

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

Vaneigem, Raoul

10.

A big leather-bound volume makes an ideal razor strap. A thin book is useful to stick under a table with a broken caster to steady it. A large, flat atlas can be used to cover a window with a broken pane. And a thick, old-fashioned heavy book with a clasp is the finest thing in the world to throw at a noisy cat.

Twain, Mark

11.

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

12.

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

Parker, Dorothy

13.

No furniture is so charming as books.

Smith, Sydney

14.

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

Maclennan, Hugh

15.

Books succeed, and lives fail.

Browning, Elizabeth Barrett

16.

All my good reading, you might say, was done in the toilet. There are passages in Ulysses which can be read only in the toilet -- if one wants to extract the full flavor of their content.

Miller, Henry

17.

Next, in importance to books are their titles.

Davies, Paul

18.

Hypocrite reader -- my fellow -- my brother!

Baudelaire, Charles

19.

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

Barrett, E.S.

20.

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

Milton, John

21.

Everything you need for better future and success has already been written. And guess what? All you have to do is go to the library.

Rohn, Jim

22.

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

Mencken, H. L.

23.

A novel is a mirror carried along a main road.

Stendhal, Henri B.

24.

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

Brodsky, Joseph

25.

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

26.

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

27.

When you reread a classic, you do not see more in the book than you did before; you see more in you than there was before.

Fadiman, Clifton

28.

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

Frost, Robert

29.

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

Channing, William Ellery

30.

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

Hubbard, Elbert

31.

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

32.

The best effect of any book, is that it excites the reader to self-activity.

Carlyle, Thomas

33.

Our high respect for a well read person is praise enough for literature.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

34.

My early and invincible love of reading I would not exchange for all the riches of India.

Gibbon, Edward

35.

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

36.

A library is thought in cold storage.

Samuel, Herbert

37.

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

Locke, John

38.

Until I feared I would lose it, I never loved to read. One does not love breathing.

Lee, Harper

39.

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

Marcel, Anthony

40.

What we become depends on what we read after all the professors have finished with us. The greatest university of all is the collection of books.

Carlyle, Thomas

41.

What is reading, but silent conversation.

Landor, Walter Savage

42.

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

43.

A great book should leave you with many experiences and slightly exhausted at the end. You should live several lives while reading it.

Styron, William

44.

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

Bevan, Aneurin

45.

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

46.

She could give herself up to the written word as naturally as a good dancer to music or a fine swimmer to water. The only difficulty was that after finishing the last sentence she was left with a feeling at once hollow and uncomfortably full. Exactly like indigestion.

Rhys, Jean

47.

No story is the same to us after a lapse of time; or rather we who read it are no longer the same interpreters.

Eliot, George

48.

A real book is not one that we read, but one that reads us.

Auden, W. H.

49.

You are wise, witty and wonderful, but you spend too much time reading this sort of stuff.

Critchfield, Jim

50.

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