Motivational Quotes

Books - reading

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

- Byron, Lord

Best Quotes about Books - reading

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

Read good, big important things.

Noonan, Peggy

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

Thank you for sending me a copy of your book -- I'll waste no time reading it.

Hadas, Moses

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

Pound, Ezra

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.

Everything in the world exists to end up in a book.

Mallarme, Stephane

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

Brodsky, Joseph

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

10.

A vacuum of ideas affects people differently than a vacuum of air, otherwise readers of books would be constantly collapsing.

Lichtenberg, Georg C.

11.

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

Camus, Albert

12.

The mortality of all inanimate things is terrible to me, but that of books most of all.

Howells, William Dean

13.

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

14.

Beware of the person of one book.

Aquinas, St. Thomas

15.

Do we write books so that they shall merely be read? Don't we also write them for employment in the household? For one that is read from start to finish, thousands are leafed through, other thousands lie motionless, others are jammed against mouseholes, thrown at rats, others are stood on, sat on, drummed on, have gingerbread baked on them or are used to light pipes.

Lichtenberg, Georg C.

16.

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

Lichtenberg, Georg C.

17.

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

18.

There are books so alive that you're always afraid that while you weren't reading, the book has gone and changed, has shifted like a river; while you went on living, it went on living too, and like a river moved on and moved away. No one has stepped twice into the same river. But did anyone ever step twice into the same book?

Tsvetaeva, Marina

19.

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

Murray, William

20.

I feel like I'm drowning. Every night, I'm carrying home loads of things to read but I'm too exhausted. I keep clipping things and Xeroxing them and planning to read them eventually, but I just end up throwing it all away and feeling guilty.

Levine, Ghita

21.

Digressions, incontestably, are the sunshine; they are the life, the soul of reading! Take them out of this book, for instance, --you might as well take the book along with them; --one cold external winter would reign in every page of it; restore them to the writer; --he steps forth like a bridegroom, --bids All-hail; brings in variety, and forbids the appetite to fail.

Sterne, Laurence

22.

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

23.

I feel a kind of reverence for the first books of young authors. There is so much aspiration in them, so much audacious hope and trembling fear, so much of the heart's history, that all errors and shortcomings are for a while lost sight of in the amiable self assertion of youth.

Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth

24.

Except a living man there is nothing more wonderful than a book! a message to us from the dead -- from human souls we never saw, who lived, perhaps, thousands of miles away. And yet these, in those little sheets of paper, speak to us, arouse us, terrify us, teach us, comfort us, open their hearts to us as brothers.

Kingsley, Charles

25.

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

Joubert, Joseph

26.

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

27.

I always like to look on the optimistic side of life, but I am realistic enough to know that life is a complex matter.

Disney, Walt

28.

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

29.

For a good book has this quality, that it is not merely a petrifaction of its author, but that once it has been tossed behind, like Deucalion's little stone, it acquires a separate and vivid life of its own.

Lejeune, Caroline

30.

I am a part of everything that I have read.

Kieran, John

31.

I don't think any good book is based on factual experience. Bad books are about things the writer already knew before he wrote them.

Fuentes, Carlos

32.

'Tis the good reader that makes the good book; in every book he finds passages which seem to be confidences or sides hidden from all else and unmistakably meant for his ear; the profit of books is according to the sensibility of the reader; the profound thought or passion sleeps as in a mine, until it is discovered by an equal mind and heart.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

33.

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

34.

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

Lichtenberg, Georg C.

35.

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

Bevan, Aneurin

36.

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

Leacock, Stephen B.

37.

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

38.

What is reading, but silent conversation.

Landor, Walter Savage

39.

A man ought to read just as his inclination leads him; for what he reads as a task will do him little good.

Johnson, Samuel

40.

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

Hope, Anthony

41.

After all, the world is not a stage -- not to me: nor a theatre: nor a show-house of any sort. And art, especially novels, are not little theatres where the reader sits aloft and watches... and sighs, commiserates, condones and smiles. That's what you want a book to be: because it leaves you so safe and superior, with your two-dollar ticket to the show. And that's what my books are not and never will be. Whoever reads me will be in the thick of the scrimmage, and if he doesn't like it -- if he wants a safe seat in the audience -- let him read someone else.

Lawrence, D. H.

42.

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

Mansfield, Katherine

43.

The books we think we ought to read are poky, dull, and dry; The books that we would like to read we are ashamed to buy; The books that people talk about we never can recall; And the books that people give us, oh, they're the worst of all.

Wells, Carolyn

44.

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.

45.

To sit alone in the lamplight with a book spread out before you hold intimate converse with men of unseen generations -- such is pleasure beyond compare.

Kenko, Yoshida

46.

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

47.

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

48.

Books had instant replay long before televised sports.

Williams, Bert

49.

Hypocrite reader -- my fellow -- my brother!

Baudelaire, Charles

50.

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

Byron, Lord