Motivational Quotes

Books - reading

A good book, in the language of the book-sellers, is a salable one; in that of the curious, a scarce one; in that of men of sense, a useful and instructive one.

- Chambers, Oswald

Best Quotes about Books - reading

What is reading, but silent conversation.

Landor, Walter Savage

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

Kempis, Thomas

Many books require no thought from those who read them, and for a very simple reason: they made no such demand upon those who wrote them. Those works, therefore, are the most valuable, that set our thinking faculties in the fullest operation. understand them.

Clarendon

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

Frost, Robert

When I am dead, I hope it may be said: His sins were scarlet, but his books were read.

Belloc, Hilaire

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

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

The newest books are those that never grow old.

Jackson, George Holbrook

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

10.

There are people who read too much: bibliobibuli. I know some who are constantly drunk on books, as other men are drunk on whiskey or religion. They wander through this most diverting and stimulating of worlds in a haze, seeing nothing and hearing nothing.

Mencken, H. L.

11.

Begin to read a book that will help you move toward your dream.

Brown, Les

12.

Reading the Scriptures is an uplifting experience.

13.

A book worth reading is worth buying.

Ruskin, John

14.

Books are the bees which carry the quickening pollen from one to another mind.

Lowell, James Russell

15.

Miss a meal if you have to, but don't miss a book.

Rohn, Jim

16.

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

Montagu, Lady Mary Wortley

17.

Readers are plentiful: thinkers are rare.

Martineau, Harriet

18.

This book is not to be tossed lightly aside, but to be hurled with great force.

Parker, Dorothy

19.

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

20.

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

Mccay, James T.

21.

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

Pascal, Blaise

22.

The books one reads in childhood, and perhaps most of all the bad and good bad books, create in one's mind a sort of false map of the world, a series of fabulous countries into which one can retreat at odd moments throughout the rest of life, and which in some cases can survive a visit to the real countries which they are supposed to represent.

Orwell, George

23.

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.

24.

Every abridgement of a good book is a fool abridged.

Montaigne, Michel Eyquem De

25.

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

26.

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

Luther, Martin

27.

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

Wycherley, William

28.

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

Gibbon, Edward

29.

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

30.

Everything you need for better future and success has already been written. And guess what? All you have to do is go to the library.

Rohn, Jim

31.

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

32.

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

33.

The Brahmins say that in their books there are many predictions of times in which it will rain. But press those books as strongly as you can, you can not get out of them a drop of water. So you can not get out of all the books that contain the best precepts the smallest good deed.

Tolstoy, Count Leo

34.

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

35.

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

Bevan, Aneurin

36.

As writers become more numerous, it is natural for readers to become more indolent; whence must necessarily arise a desire of attaining knowledge with the greatest possible ease.

Goldsmith, Oliver

37.

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

38.

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

39.

Books are not absolutely dead things, but do contain a certain potency of life in them, to be as active as the soul whose progeny they are; they preserve, as in a vial, the purest efficacy and extraction of the living intellect that bred them.

Milton, John

40.

The only books that influence us are those for which we are ready, and which have gone a little farther down our particular path than we have yet got ourselves.

Forster, Edward M.

41.

Don't ask me who's influenced me. A lion is made up of the lambs he's digested, and I've been reading all my life.

Seferis, Giorgos

42.

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

Holmes, Oliver Wendell

43.

The power of a text is different when it is read from when it is copied out. Only the copied text thus commands the soul of him who is occupied with it, whereas the mere reader never discovers the new aspects of his inner self that are opened by the text, that road cut through the interior jungle forever closing behind it: because the reader follows the movement of his mind in the free flight of day-dreaming, whereas the copier submits it to command.

Benjamin, Walter

44.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

45.

Reading is equivalent to thinking with someone else's head instead of with one's own.

Schopenhauer, Arthur

46.

Don't just read the easy stuff. You may be entertained by it, but you will never grow from it.

Rohn, Jim

47.

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