Motivational Quotes

Books - reading

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

Best Quotes about Books - reading

The multitude of books is a great evil. There is no limit to this fever for writing.

Luther, Martin

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

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.

A bibliophile of little means is likely to suffer often. Books don't slip from his hands but fly past him through the air, high as birds, high as prices.

Neruda, Pablo

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

Ruskin, John

He had read much, if one considers his long life; but his contemplation was much more than his reading. He was wont to say that if he had read as much as other men he should have known no more than other men.

Aubrey, John

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

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

Howells, William Dean

A wicked book cannot repent.

Proverb

10.

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

11.

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.

12.

A good title is the title of a successful book.

Chandler, Raymond

13.

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

14.

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

15.

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

16.

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

Whitman, Walt

17.

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

Porter, Noah

18.

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

19.

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

Forster, Edward M.

20.

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

21.

To use books rightly, is to go to them for help; to appeal to them when our own knowledge and power fail; to be led by them into wider sight and purer conception than our own, and to receive from them the united sentence of the judges and councils of all time, against our solitary and unstable opinions.

Ruskin, John

22.

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

23.

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

24.

An empty book is like an infant's soul, in which anything may be written. It is capable of all things, but containeth nothing. I have a mind to fill this with profitable wonders.

Traherne, Thomas

25.

Books, books, books had found the secret of a garret-room piled high with cases in my father's name; Piled high, packed large, --where, creeping in and out among the giant fossils of my past, like some small nimble mouse between the ribs of a mastodon, I nibbled here and there at this or that box, pulling through the gap, in heats of terror, haste, victorious joy, the first book first. And how I felt it beat under my pillow, in the morning's dark. An hour before the sun would let me read! My books!

Browning, Elizabeth Barrett

26.

Books are the blessed chloroform of the mind.

Chambers, Robert

27.

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

Byron, Lord

28.

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

Leacock, Stephen B.

29.

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

Rochman, Hazel

30.

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

31.

Tradition is but a meteor, which, if it once falls, cannot be rekindled. Memory, once interrupted, is not to be recalled. But written learning is a fixed luminary, which, after the cloud that had hidden it has passed away, is again bright in its proper station. So books are faithful repositories, which may be awhile neglected or forgotten, but when opened again, will again impart instruction.

Johnson

32.

To feel most beautifully alive means to be reading something beautiful, ready always to apprehend in the flow of language the sudden flash of poetry.

Bachelard, Gaston

33.

The last thing one discovers in composing a work is what to put first.

Pascal, Blaise

34.

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.

35.

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

Pound, Ezra

36.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

37.

When you have mastered numbers, you will in fact no longer be reading numbers, any more than you read words when reading books You will be reading meanings.

Geneen, Harold S.

38.

I wish I could write a beautiful book to break those hearts that are soon to cease to exist: a book of faith and small neat worlds and of people who live by the philosophies of popular songs.

39.

You will be the same person in five as you are today except for the people you meet and the books you read.

Jones, Charles ''Tremendous''

40.

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

Critchfield, Jim

41.

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

42.

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

43.

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

Wycherley, William

44.

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

Gibbon, Edward

45.

In science read the newest works, in literature read the oldest.

Bulwer-Lytton, Edward G.

46.

When the book comes out it may hurt you -- but in order for me to do it, it had to hurt me first. I can only tell you about yourself as much as I can face about myself.

Baldwin, James

47.

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

48.

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

49.

My books kept me from the ring, the dog-pit, the tavern, and the saloon.

Hood, Thomas

50.

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

Mallarme, Stephane