Motivational Quotes

Books - reading

A novel points out that the world consists entirely of exceptions.

- Carey, Joyce

Best Quotes about Books - reading

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

Porter, Noah

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

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

Books are divided into two classes, the books of the hour and the books of all time.

Ruskin, John

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

Reading is equivalent to thinking with someone else's head instead of with one's own.

Schopenhauer, Arthur

To buy books would be a good thing if we also could buy the time to read them.

Schopenhauer, Arthur

To read well, that is, to read true books in a true spirit, is a noble exercise, and one that will task the reader more than any other exercise which the customs of the day esteem. It requires a training such as the athletes underwent, the steady intention almost of the whole life to this object.

Thoreau, Henry David

There is no robber worse than a bad book.

Proverb, Italian

10.

With one day's reading a man may have the key in his hands.

Pound, Ezra

11.

You've really got to start hitting the books because it's no joke out here.

Lee, Spike

12.

The books we read should be chosen with great care, that they may be, as an Egyptian king wrote over his library, The medicines of the soul.

Hood, Paxton

13.

Some of the most famous books are the least worth reading. Their fame was due to their having done something that needed to be doing in their day. The work is done and the virtue of the book has expired.

Morely, John

14.

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

15.

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

16.

As writers become more numerous, it is natural for readers to become more indolent; whence must necessarily arise a desire of attaining knowledge with the greatest possible ease.

Goldsmith, Oliver

17.

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

Critchfield, Jim

18.

Books in a large university library system: 2, 000,000. Books in an average large city library: 1 0,000. Average number of books in a chain bookstore: 30, 000. Books in an average neighborhood branch library: 20, 000.

Horowitz, Lois

19.

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

Mallarme, Stephane

20.

There is creative reading as well as creative writing.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

21.

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

Millay, Edna St. Vincent

22.

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

Descartes, Rene

23.

The novel can't compete with cars, the movies, television, and liquor. A guy who's had a good feed and tanked up on good wine gives his old lady a kiss after supper and his day is over. Finished.

Celine, Louis-Ferdinand

24.

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

Rochman, Hazel

25.

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

Auden, W. H.

26.

Books give not wisdom where none was before. But where some is, there reading makes it more.

Harington, John

27.

Old books that have ceased to be of service should no more be abandoned than should old friends who have ceased to give pleasure.

Worsthorne, Sir Peregrine

28.

The most foolish kind of a book is a kind of leaky boat on the sea of wisdom; some of the wisdom will get in anyhow.

Holmes, Oliver Wendell

29.

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

Marcel, Anthony

30.

There is a set of religious, or rather moral, writings which teach that virtue is the certain road to happiness, and vice to misery in this world. A very wholesome and comfortable doctrine, and to which we have but one objection, namely, that it is not true.

Fielding, Henry

31.

Books are not absolutely dead things, but do contain a certain potency of life in them, to be as active as the soul whose progeny they are; they preserve, as in a vial, the purest efficacy and extraction of the living intellect that bred them.

Milton, John

32.

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

33.

I've never know any trouble than an hour's reading didn't assuage.

Secondat, Charles de

34.

There are two kinds of books. Those that no one reads and those that no one ought to read.

Mencken, H. L.

35.

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

36.

Books are not men and yet they stay alive.

Benet, Stephen Vincent

37.

The age of the book is almost gone.

Steiner, George

38.

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

39.

Miss a meal if you have to, but don't miss a book.

Rohn, Jim

40.

Books succeed, and lives fail.

Browning, Elizabeth Barrett

41.

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

42.

Happy is he who has laid up in his youth, and held fast in all fortune, a genuine and passionate love for reading.

Choate, Rufus

43.

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.

44.

Early in the morning, at break of day, in all the freshness and dawn of one's strength, to read a book --I call that vicious!

Nietzsche, Friedrich

45.

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

Howells, William Dean

46.

The greatest gift is the passion for reading. It is cheap, it consoles, it distracts, it excites, it gives you knowledge of the world and experience of a wide kind. It is a moral illumination.

Hardwick, Elizabeth

47.

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

Parker, Dorothy

48.

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

Disraeli, Benjamin

49.

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

Pound, Ezra

50.

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