Motivational Quotes

Books - reading

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

Best Quotes about Books - reading

A book worth reading is worth buying.

Ruskin, John

Books are but waste paper unless we spend in action the wisdom we get from thought -- asleep. When we are weary of the living, we may repair to the dead, who have nothing of peevishness, pride, or design in their conversation.

Collier, Jeremy

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

Critchfield, Jim

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

One sheds one's sicknesses in books -- repeats and presents again one's emotions, to be master of them.

Lawrence, D. H.

Until I feared I would lose it, I never loved to read. One does not love breathing.

Lee, Harper

Until it is kindled by a spirit as flamingly alive as the one which gave it birth a book is dead to us. Words divested of their magic are but dead hieroglyphs.

Miller, Henry

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

Joubert, Joseph

The age of the book is almost gone.

Steiner, George

10.

Everything in this book may be wrong. [The Savior's Manual]

Bach, Richard

11.

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

12.

All my good reading, you might say, was done in the toilet. There are passages in Ulysses which can be read only in the toilet -- if one wants to extract the full flavor of their content.

Miller, Henry

13.

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

14.

God be thanked for books; they are the voices of the distant and the dead, and make us heirs of the spiritual life of past ages.

Channing, William Ellery

15.

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

Brodsky, Joseph

16.

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

Ruskin, John

17.

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

18.

The chief knowledge that a man gets from reading books is the knowledge that very few of them are worth reading.

Mencken, H. L.

19.

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

Hood, Thomas

20.

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

21.

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

22.

A house is not a home unless it contains food and fire for the mind as well as the body.

Fuller, Margaret

23.

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

24.

Books are men of higher stature; the only men that speak aloud for future times to hear.

Barrett, E.S.

25.

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

Disraeli, Benjamin

26.

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

Wesley, John

27.

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

28.

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''

29.

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

30.

If I had my way books would not be written in English, but in an exceedingly difficult secret language that only skilled professional readers and story-tellers could interpret. Then people like you would have to go to public halls and pay good prices to hear the professionals decode and read the books aloud for you. This plan would have the advantage of scaring off all amateur authors, retired politicians, country doctors and I-Married-a-Midget writers who would not have the patience to learn the secret language.

Davies, Robertson

31.

The book you don't read won't help.

Rohn, Jim

32.

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

33.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

34.

Books are the blessed chloroform of the mind.

Chambers, Robert

35.

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

36.

No entertainment is so cheap as reading, nor is any pleasure so lasting.

Montagu, Lady Mary Wortley

37.

No story is the same to us after a lapse of time; or rather we who read it are no longer the same interpreters.

Eliot, George

38.

It is from books that wise people derive consolation in the troubles of life.

Hugo, Victor

39.

Footnotes are the finer-suckered surfaces that allow testicular paragraphs to hold fast to the wider reality of the library.

Baker, Nicholson

40.

Who kills a man kills a reasonable creature, God's image, but thee who destroys a good book, kills reason itself.

Milton, John

41.

Books succeed, and lives fail.

Browning, Elizabeth Barrett

42.

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

Colton, Charles Caleb

43.

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

Johnson, Samuel

44.

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

45.

In the case of good books, the point is not how many of them you can get through, but rather how many can get through to you.

Adler, Mortimer J.

46.

I am what libraries and librarians have made me, with little assistance from a professor of Greek and poets.

Sandwell, B. K.

47.

Read as you taste fruit or savor wine, or enjoy friendship, love or life.

Jackson, Holbrook

48.

Every man is a volume if you know how to read him.