Motivational Quotes

Books - reading

'Tis pleasant, sure, to see one's name in print; A book's a book, although there's nothing in it.

- Byron, Lord

Best Quotes about Books - reading

I can't bear art that you can walk round and admire. A book should be either a bandit or a rebel or a man in the crowd.

Lawrence, D. H.

The world may be full of fourth-rate writers but it's also full of fourth-rate readers.

Barstow, Stan

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

Faulkner, William

Does there, I wonder, exist a being who has read all, or approximately all, that the person of average culture is supposed to have read, and that not to have read is a social sin? If such a being does exist, surely he is an old, a very old man.

Bennett, Arnold

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

Murray, William

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

Porter, Noah

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

Lowell, James Russell

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

Frost, Robert

Books are those faithful mirrors that reflect to our mind the minds of sages and heroes.

Gibbon, Edward

10.

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

Wilde, Oscar

11.

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

12.

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

13.

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

Erasmus, Desiderius

14.

Don't ask me who's influenced me. A lion is made up of the lambs he's digested, and I've been reading all my life.

Seferis, Giorgos

15.

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

16.

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

Carlyle, Thomas

17.

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

18.

What is the most precious, the most exciting smell awaiting you in the house when you return to it after a dozen years or so? The smell of roses, you think? No, moldering books.

Sinyavsky, Andre

19.

One always tends to overpraise a long book, because one has got through it.

Forster, Edward M.

20.

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

Byron, Lord

21.

Beware of the person of one book.

Aquinas, St. Thomas

22.

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

Milton, John

23.

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

24.

Fiction reveals truth that reality obscures.

West, Jessamyn

25.

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

26.

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

Camus, Albert

27.

The man who does not read books has no advantage over the man that can not read them.

Twain, Mark

28.

Thy books should, like thy friends, not many be, yet such wherein men may thy judgment see.

Wycherley, William

29.

It is books that teach us to refine our pleasures when young, and to recall them with satisfaction when we are old.

Hunt, Leigh

30.

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

Lichtenberg, Georg C.

31.

There was a time when the world acted on books; now books act on the world.

Joubert, Joseph

32.

Those who do not read are no better off than those who cannot read.

33.

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.

34.

All the known world, excepting only savage nations, is governed by books.

Voltaire

35.

A book worth reading is worth buying.

Ruskin, John

36.

I love to lose myself in other men's minds. When I am not walking, I am reading. I cannot sit and think; books think for me.

Lamb, Charles

37.

No furniture is so charming as books.

Smith, Sydney

38.

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

Disraeli, Benjamin

39.

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

Millay, Edna St. Vincent

40.

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

Temple, Sir William

41.

Reading is to the mind what exercise is to the body. It is wholesome and bracing for the mind to have its faculties kept on the stretch.

Steele, Sir Richard

42.

Books and marriage go ill together.

Moliere

43.

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

44.

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

45.

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

46.

Every abridgement of a good book is a fool abridged.

Montaigne, Michel Eyquem De

47.

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

Bevan, Aneurin

48.

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

Gibbon, Edward

49.

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

50.

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

Whitman, Walt