Motivational Quotes

Books - reading

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

- Chamfort, Sebastien-Roch Nicolas De

Best Quotes about Books - reading

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

Most books, like their authors, are born to die; of only a few books can it be said that death has no dominion over them; they live, and their influence lives forever.

Swartz, J.

Prerequisite for rereadability in books: that they be forgettable.

Rostand, Jean

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

Forster, Edward M.

My books kept me from the ring, the dog-pit, the tavern, and the saloon.

Hood, Thomas

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

Colton, Charles Caleb

I always begin at the left with the opening word of the sentence and read toward the right and I recommend this method.

Thurber, James

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

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

10.

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

Hope, Anthony

11.

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

Chesterton, Gilbert K.

12.

One always tends to overpraise a long book, because one has got through it.

Forster, Edward M.

13.

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

14.

A person of mature years and ripe development, who is expecting nothing from literature but the corroboration and renewal of past ideas, may find satisfaction in a lucidity so complete as to occasion no imaginative excitement, but young and ambitious students are not content with it. They seek the excitement because they are capable of the growth that it accompanies.

Cooley, Charles Horton

15.

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

16.

There is creative reading as well as creative writing.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

17.

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

Byron, Lord

18.

Once we have learned to read, meaning of words can somehow register without consciousness.

Marcel, Anthony

19.

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

Rohn, Jim

20.

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

Phillips, Wendell

21.

I've never know any trouble than an hour's reading didn't assuage.

Secondat, Charles de

22.

Reading a book is like re-writing it for yourself. You bring to a novel, anything you read, all your experience of the world. You bring your history and you read it in your own terms.

Carter, Angela

23.

Fiction reveals truth that reality obscures.

West, Jessamyn

24.

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

Lee, Spike

25.

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

Millay, Edna St. Vincent

26.

I know every book of mine by its smell, and I have but to put my nose between the pages to be reminded of all sorts of things.

Gissing, George Robert

27.

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

Dawkins, John

28.

A house without books is like a room without windows. No man has a right to bring up his children without surrounding them with books, if he has the means to buy them. It is a wrong to his family. Children learn to read by being in the presence of books. The love of knowledge comes with reading and grows upon it. And the love of knowledge, in a young mind, is almost always a warrant against the inferior excitement of passions and vices.

Mann, Horace

29.

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

30.

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

31.

Footnotes are the finer-suckered surfaces that allow testicular paragraphs to hold fast to the wider reality of the library.

Baker, Nicholson

32.

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

Parker, Dorothy

33.

Books in a large university library system: 2, 000,000. Books in an average large city library: 1 0,000. Average number of books in a chain bookstore: 30, 000. Books in an average neighborhood branch library: 20, 000.

Horowitz, Lois

34.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

35.

Until I feared I would lose it, I never loved to read. One does not love breathing.

Lee, Harper

36.

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

37.

One sheds one's sicknesses in books -- repeats and presents again one's emotions, to be master of them.

Lawrence, D. H.

38.

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

Temple, Sir William

39.

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

40.

A good title is the title of a successful book.

Chandler, Raymond

41.

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

Morely, John

42.

The most foolish kind of a book is a kind of leaky boat on the sea of wisdom; some of the wisdom will get in anyhow.

Holmes, Oliver Wendell

43.

Books had instant replay long before televised sports.

Williams, Bert

44.

A library is thought in cold storage.

Samuel, Herbert

45.

This is not a book. This is libel, slander, defamation of character. This is not a book, in the ordinary sense of the word. No, this is a prolonged insult, a gob of spit in the face of Art, a kick in the pants to God, Man, Destiny, Time, Love, Beauty... what you will. I am going to sing for you, a little off key perhaps, but I will sing.

Miller, Henry

46.

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.

47.

What is reading, but silent conversation.

Landor, Walter Savage

48.

I used to walk to school with my nose buried in a book.

Coolio

49.

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

Kempis, Thomas

50.

Then I though of reading -- the nice and subtle happiness of reading ... this joy not dulled by age, this polite and unpunishable vice, this selfish, serene, lifelong intoxication.

Smith, Logan Pearsall