Motivational Quotes

Books - reading

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

Best Quotes about Books - reading

Fiction reveals truth that reality obscures.

West, Jessamyn

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

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

Voltaire

The reading or non-reading a book will never keep down a single petticoat.

Byron, Lord

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

Wilde, Oscar

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

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

Lee, Spike

The world may be full of fourth-rate writers but it's also full of fourth-rate readers.

Barstow, Stan

10.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

11.

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

12.

A book might be written on the injustice of the just.

Hope, Anthony

13.

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

Millay, Edna St. Vincent

14.

A successful book cannot afford to be more than ten percent new.

Mcluhan, Marshall

15.

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

16.

If I have not read a book before, it is, for all intents and purposes, new to me whether it was printed yesterday or three hundred years ago.

Hazlitt, William

17.

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

Pound, Ezra

18.

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

19.

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

Pound, Ezra

20.

No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader.

Frost, Robert

21.

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

Byron, Lord

22.

Those who do not read are no better off than those who cannot read.

23.

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

Porter, Noah

24.

Books and marriage go ill together.

Moliere

25.

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

26.

Books are the blessed chloroform of the mind.

Chambers, Robert

27.

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

28.

A book is a mirror: If an ass peers into it, you can't expect an apostle to look out.

Lichtenberg, Georg C.

29.

Every abridgement of a good book is a fool abridged.

Montaigne, Michel Eyquem De

30.

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

31.

A good book is the best of friends, the same today and for ever.

Tupper, Martin

32.

Books are standing counselors and preachers, always at hand, and always disinterested; having this advantage over oral instructors, that they are ready to repeat their lesson as often as we please.

Chambers, Oswald

33.

What is important is not to be able to read rapidly, but to be able to decide what not to read.

Mccay, James T.

34.

A wicked book cannot repent.

Proverb

35.

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

36.

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

37.

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

Phillips, Wendell

38.

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

39.

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

Chamfort, Sebastien-Roch Nicolas De

40.

Somewhere, everywhere, now hidden, now apparent in what ever is written down, is the form of a human being. If we seek to know him, are we idly occupied?

Woolf, Virginia

41.

Books succeed, and lives fail.

Browning, Elizabeth Barrett

42.

A multitude of books distracts the mind.

Socrates

43.

No furniture is so charming as books.

Smith, Sydney

44.

Any book that helps a child to form a habit of reading, to make reading one of his deep and continuing needs, is good for him.

McKenna, Richard

45.

A library is thought in cold storage.

Samuel, Herbert

46.

I always like to look on the optimistic side of life, but I am realistic enough to know that life is a complex matter.

Disney, Walt

47.

Books to judicious compilers, are useful; to particular arts and professions, they are absolutely necessary; to men of real science, they are tools: but more are tools to them.

Johnson

48.

Read, read, read. Read everything-- trash, classics, good and bad, and see how they do it. Just like a carpenter who works as an apprentice and studies the master. Read! You'll absorb it. Then write. If it is good, you'll find out. If it's not, throw it out the window.

Faulkner, William

49.

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

50.

Books, like friends, should be few and well chosen. Like friends, too, we should return to them again and again for, like true friends, they will never fail us -- never cease to instruct -- never cloy.

Colton, Charles Caleb