Motivational Quotes

Books - reading

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

Best Quotes about Books - reading

Who ever converses among old books will be hard to please among the new.

Temple, Sir William

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

Every abridgement of a good book is a fool abridged.

Montaigne, Michel Eyquem De

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

Rohn, Jim

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

In any situation, ask yourself: What strengths do I possess that can contribute towards accomplishing something in this situation? Then follow through.

The printing press is either the greatest blessing or the greatest curse of modern times, sometimes one forgets which it is.

Barrie, Sir James M.

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

Bevan, Aneurin

Education... has produced a vast population able to read but unable to distinguish what is worth reading, an easy prey to sensations and cheap appeals.

Trevelyan, G. M.

10.

A multitude of books distracts the mind.

Socrates

11.

The lessons taught in great books are misleading. The commerce in life is rarely so simple and never so just.

Brookner, Anita

12.

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

Lichtenberg, Georg C.

13.

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''

14.

Except a living man there is nothing more wonderful than a book! a message to us from the dead -- from human souls we never saw, who lived, perhaps, thousands of miles away. And yet these, in those little sheets of paper, speak to us, arouse us, terrify us, teach us, comfort us, open their hearts to us as brothers.

Kingsley, Charles

15.

Much reading is an oppression of the mind, and extinguishes the natural candle, which is the reason of so many senseless scholars in the world.

Penn, William

16.

Ideally a book would have no order to it, and the reader would have to discover his own.

Vaneigem, Raoul

17.

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

Pound, Ezra

18.

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

19.

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

Hope, Anthony

20.

The oldest books are still only just out to those who have not read them.

Butler, Samuel

21.

It is books that teach us to refine our pleasures when young, and to recall them with satisfaction when we are old.

Hunt, Leigh

22.

The reason a writer writes a book is to forget a book and the reason a reader reads one is to remember it.

Wolfe, Thomas

23.

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

Schopenhauer, Arthur

24.

The great American novel has not only already been written, it has already been rejected.

Dane, Frank

25.

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

26.

To buy books would be a good thing if we also could buy the time to read them.

Schopenhauer, Arthur

27.

Reading furnishes the mind only with material for knowledge; it is thinking that makes what we read ours.

Locke, John

28.

The tools I need for my work are paper, tobacco, food, and a little whiskey.

Faulkner, William

29.

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

30.

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

31.

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

Leacock, Stephen B.

32.

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

33.

Prerequisite for rereadability in books: that they be forgettable.

Rostand, Jean

34.

There are very many people who read simply to prevent themselves from thinking.

Lichtenberg, Georg C.

35.

You will find most books worth reading are worth reading twice.

Morely, John

36.

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

Sandwell, B. K.

37.

The mere brute pleasure of reading --the sort of pleasure a cow must have in grazing.

Chesterton, Gilbert K.

38.

A big leather-bound volume makes an ideal razor strap. A thin book is useful to stick under a table with a broken caster to steady it. A large, flat atlas can be used to cover a window with a broken pane. And a thick, old-fashioned heavy book with a clasp is the finest thing in the world to throw at a noisy cat.

Twain, Mark

39.

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

40.

A book is like a man -- clever and dull, brave and cowardly, beautiful and ugly. For every flowering thought there will be a page like a wet and mangy mongrel, and for every looping flight a tap on the wing and a reminder that wax cannot hold the feathers firm too near the sun.

Steinbeck, John

41.

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.

42.

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

Gibbon, Edward

43.

After all manner of professors have done their best for us, the place we are to get knowledge is in books. The true university of these days is a collection of books.

Carlyle, Thomas

44.

A library is thought in cold storage.

Samuel, Herbert

45.

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

46.

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

Howells, William Dean

47.

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

48.

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

49.

This will never be a civilized country until we expend more money for books than we do for chewing gum.

Hubbard, Elbert

50.

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