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

Five daily newspapers arrive in my California driveway. The New York times and the Wall Street Journal are supplemented by three local papers. As for magazines, I read, or at least skim, Business Week, Forbes, The Economist, INC; Industry Week, Fortune. Other subscriptions include Sales and Marketing Management, Modern Health Care, Progressive Grocer, High Tech Business, and Slaon Management Review from MIT. I religiously read Business Tokyo, Asia Week, and Far Eastern Economic Review. I glance at Newsweek and Time ... but I devour the New Republic, Policy Review, Foreign Affairs, The Washington Monthly, and Public Interest. How about books? A dozen or more each month.

Peters, Thomas J.

Beware of the person of one book.

Aquinas, St. Thomas

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

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

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.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

Read good, big important things.

Noonan, Peggy

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

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

10.

Reading is to the mind what exercise is to the body. It is wholesome and bracing for the mind to have its faculties kept on the stretch.

Steele, Sir Richard

11.

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

Bevan, Aneurin

12.

Books had instant replay long before televised sports.

Williams, Bert

13.

It does not follow because many books are written by persons born in America that there exists an American literature. Books which imitate or represent the thoughts and life of Europe do not constitute an American literature. Before such can exist, an original idea must animate this nation and fresh currents of life must call into life fresh thoughts along the shore.

Fuller, Margaret

14.

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

Whitman, Walt

15.

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

16.

The books that everybody admires are those that nobody reads.

France, Anatole

17.

Thank you for sending me a copy of your book -- I'll waste no time reading it.

Hadas, Moses

18.

A library is thought in cold storage.

Samuel, Herbert

19.

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

20.

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

Byron, Lord

21.

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

22.

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

23.

Every abridgement of a good book is a fool abridged.

Montaigne, Michel Eyquem De

24.

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

25.

The unread story is not a story; it is little black marks on wood pulp. The reader, reading it, makes it live: a live thing, a story.

Guin, Ursula K. Le

26.

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

Colton, Charles Caleb

27.

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

Barrett, E.S.

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.

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

30.

Books are the best of things if well used; if abused, among the worst. They are good for nothing but to inspire. I had better never see a book than be warped by its attraction clean out of my own orbit, and made a satellite instead of a system.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

31.

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

Jackson, Holbrook

32.

Hypocrite reader -- my fellow -- my brother!

Baudelaire, Charles

33.

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

Pound, Ezra

34.

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

35.

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

36.

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

37.

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

Spielberg, Steven

38.

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

39.

What gunpowder did for war the printing press has done for the mind.

Phillips, Wendell

40.

A conventional good read is usually a bad read, a relaxing bath in what we know already. A true good read is surely an act of innovative creation in which we, the readers, become conspirators.

Bradbury, Malcolm

41.

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

42.

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

Wesley, John

43.

A book that is shut is but a block.

Fuller, Thomas

44.

No matter how busy you may think you are, you must find time for reading, or surrender yourself to self-chosen ignorance.

Townsend, Atwood H.

45.

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

Pascal, Blaise

46.

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

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.

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

49.

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

50.

In science, read by preference the newest works. In literature, read the oldest. The classics are always modern.

Lytton, Lord Edward