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

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

Phillips, Wendell

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

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

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

Sandwell, B. K.

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

Porter, Noah

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

Read good, big important things.

Noonan, Peggy

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

Belloc, Hilaire

Books succeed, and lives fail.

Browning, Elizabeth Barrett

10.

He has only half learned the art of reading who has not added to it the more refined art of skipping and skimming.

Balfour, Arthur James

11.

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

Lichtenberg, Georg C.

12.

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

13.

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

Dane, Frank

14.

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

Hadas, Moses

15.

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

16.

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

Pound, Ezra

17.

The books we read should be chosen with great care, that they may be, as an Egyptian king wrote over his library, The medicines of the soul.

Hood, Paxton

18.

A book is a part of life, a manifestation of life, just as much as a tree or a horse or a star. It obeys its own rhythms, its own laws, whether it be a novel, a play, or a diary. The deep, hidden rhythm of life is always there -- that of the pulse, the heart beat.

Miller, Henry

19.

Books are lighthouses erected in the great sea of time.

Whipple, Edwin P.

20.

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

Holmes, Oliver Wendell

21.

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

Bach, Richard

22.

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

Brookner, Anita

23.

A man ought to read just as his inclination leads him; for what he reads as a task will do him little good.

Johnson, Samuel

24.

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

25.

The best effect of any book, is that it excites the reader to self-activity.

Carlyle, Thomas

26.

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

27.

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

Bevan, Aneurin

28.

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

Voltaire

29.

Books are those faithful mirrors that reflect to our mind the minds of sages and heroes.

Gibbon, Edward

30.

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

Lowell, James Russell

31.

The books that everybody admires are those that nobody reads.

France, Anatole

32.

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

Gibbon, Edward

33.

The world of books is the most remarkable creation of man nothing else that he builds ever lasts monuments fall; nations perish; civilization grow old and die out; new races build others. But in the world of books are volumes that have seen this happen again and again and yet live on. Still young, still as fresh as the day they were written, still telling men's hearts, of the hearts of men centuries dead.

Day, Clarence

34.

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

35.

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

Pascal, Blaise

36.

A bad book is as much of a labor to write as a good one; it comes as sincerely from the author's soul.

Huxley, Aldous

37.

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

Hunt, Leigh

38.

Reading makes immigrants of us all. It takes us away from home, but more important, it finds homes for us everywhere.

Rochman, Hazel

39.

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.

40.

There are two kinds of books. Those that no one reads and those that no one ought to read.

Mencken, H. L.

41.

I wish I could write a beautiful book to break those hearts that are soon to cease to exist: a book of faith and small neat worlds and of people who live by the philosophies of popular songs.

42.

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

43.

A novel points out that the world consists entirely of exceptions.

Carey, Joyce

44.

From the moment I picked your book up until I laid it down I was convulsed with laughter. Some day I intend reading it.

Marx, Groucho

45.

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

46.

I heard his library burned down and both books were destroyed -- and one of them hadn't even been colored in yet.

Dawkins, John

47.

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

Tupper, Martin

48.

No furniture is so charming as books.

Smith, Sydney

49.

Today a reader, tomorrow a leader.