Motivational Quotes

Books - reading

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

- Carey, Joyce

Best Quotes about Books - reading

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

Twain, Mark

The things I want to know are in books; my best friend is the man who'll get me a book I ain't read.

Lincoln, Abraham

The newest books are those that never grow old.

Jackson, George Holbrook

How can you dare teach a man to read until you've taught him everything else first?

Shaw, George Bernard

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.

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

People are much more willing to lend you books than bookcases.

Twain, Mark

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

Porter, Noah

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

Disraeli, Benjamin

10.

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

Twain, Mark

11.

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

Wilde, Oscar

12.

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

Wesley, John

13.

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

14.

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

15.

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

16.

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

17.

Learning to read has been reduced to a process of mastering a series of narrow, specific, hierarchical skills. Where armed-forces recruits learn the components of a rifle or the intricacies of close order drill by the numbers, recruits to reading learn its mechanics sound by sound and word by word.

Gross, Jacquelyn

18.

I am a part of everything that I have read.

Kieran, John

19.

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

Howells, William Dean

20.

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

Spielberg, Steven

21.

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

Voltaire

22.

You will, I am sure, agree with me that... if page 534 only finds us in the second chapter, the length of the first one must have been really intolerable.

Doyle, Sir Arthur Conan

23.

Read good, big important things.

Noonan, Peggy

24.

You can either read something many times in order to be assured that you got it all, or else you can define your purpose and use techniques which will assure that you have met it and gotten what you need.

Kump, Peter

25.

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

Wycherley, William

26.

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

Maclennan, Hugh

27.

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

Erasmus, Desiderius

28.

Reading a book is like re-writing it for yourself. You bring to a novel, anything you read, all your experience of the world. You bring your history and you read it in your own terms.

Carter, Angela

29.

'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

30.

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

Colton, Charles Caleb

31.

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

32.

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

33.

Beware of the person of one book.

Aquinas, St. Thomas

34.

Reading is a basic tool in the living of a good life.

Adler, Mortimer J.

35.

Most books today seemed to have been written overnight from books read the day before.

Chamfort, Sebastien-Roch Nicolas De

36.

The Bible remained for me a book of books, still divine -- but divine in the sense that all great books are divine which teach men how to live righteously.

Keith, Sir Arthur

37.

Everywhere I have sought rest and not found it, except sitting in a corner by myself with a little book.

Kempis, Thomas

38.

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

39.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

40.

Old books, you know well, are books of the world's youth, and new books are the fruits of its age.

Holmes, Oliver Wendell

41.

A multitude of books distracts the mind.

Socrates

42.

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

Joubert, Joseph

43.

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

Critchfield, Jim

44.

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

45.

Books are lighthouses erected in the great sea of time.

Whipple, Edwin P.

46.

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

47.

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

Hunt, Leigh

48.

I am not a speed reader. I am a speed understander.