Motivational Quotes

Books - reading

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

- Camus, Albert

Best Quotes about Books - reading

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

Morely, John

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

The age of the book is almost gone.

Steiner, George

The reading of all good books is like a conversation with all the finest men of past centuries.

Descartes, Rene

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

In the dark colony of night, when I consider man's magnificent capacity for malice, madness, folly, envy, rage, and destructiveness, and I wonder whether we shall not end up as breakfast for newts and polyps, I seem to hear the muffled cries of all the words in all the books with covers closed.

Rosten, Leo

A wicked book cannot repent.

Proverb

The worst readers are those who behave like plundering troops: they take away a few things they can use, dirty and confound the remainder, and revile the whole.

Nietzsche, Friedrich

Book love... is your pass to the greatest, the purest, and the most perfect pleasure that God has prepared for His creatures.

Trollope, Anthony

10.

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

11.

The printing press is either the greatest blessing or the greatest curse of modern times, sometimes one forgets which it is.

Barrie, Sir James M.

12.

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

Barstow, Stan

13.

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

Gibbon, Edward

14.

The books that everybody admires are those that nobody reads.

France, Anatole

15.

There is creative reading as well as creative writing.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

16.

Very young children eat their books, literally devouring their contents. This is one reason for the scarcity of first editions of Alice in Wonderland and other favorites of the nursery.

Rosenbach, A. S. W.

17.

Only a generation of readers will span a generation of writers.

Spielberg, Steven

18.

All good books are alike in that they are truer than if they had really happened and after you are finished reading one you will feel that all that happened to you and afterwards it all belongs to you; the good and the bad, the ecstasy, the remorse, and sorrow, the people and the places and how the weather was.

Hemingway, Ernest

19.

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

Carlyle, Thomas

20.

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

21.

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

22.

No furniture is so charming as books.

Smith, Sydney

23.

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

Whitman, Walt

24.

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

Twain, Mark

25.

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

Camus, Albert

26.

A book worth reading is worth buying.

Ruskin, John

27.

Books constitute capital. A library book lasts as long as a house, for hundreds of years. It is not, then, an article of mere consumption but fairly of capital, and often in the case of professional men, setting out in life, it is their only capital.

Jefferson, Thomas

28.

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

Howells, William Dean

29.

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

Locke, John

30.

Beware you be not swallowed up in books! An ounce of love is worth a pound of knowledge.

Wesley, John

31.

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

Porter, Noah

32.

We should be as careful of the books we read, as of the company we keep. The dead very often have more power than the living.

Edwards, Tryon

33.

Books are masters who instruct us without rods or ferules, without words or anger, without bread or money. If you approach them, they are not asleep; if you seek them, they do not hide; if you blunder, they do not scold; if you are ignorant, they do not laugh at you.

Bury, Richard De

34.

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

Lichtenberg, Georg C.

35.

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

36.

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

Bevan, Aneurin

37.

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.

38.

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

39.

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

Hope, Anthony

40.

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

Johnson, Samuel

41.

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.

42.

All the best stories in the world are but one story in reality -- the story of escape. It is the only thing which interests us all and at all times, how to escape.

Benson, Arthur Christopher

43.

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

44.

Read, read, read. Read everything-- trash, classics, good and bad, and see how they do it. Just like a carpenter who works as an apprentice and studies the master. Read! You'll absorb it. Then write. If it is good, you'll find out. If it's not, throw it out the window.

Faulkner, William

45.

Readers are less and less seen as mere non-writers, the subhuman other or flawed derivative of the author; the lack of a pen is no longer a shameful mark of secondary status but a positively enabling space, just as within every writer can be seen to lurk, as a repressed but contaminating antithesis, a reader.

Eagleton, Terry

46.

The reason a writer writes a book is to forget a book and the reason a reader reads one is to remember it.

Wolfe, Thomas

47.

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

Critchfield, Jim

48.

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

Pound, Ezra

49.

Next to acquiring good friends, the best acquisition is that of good books.