Motivational Quotes

Books - reading

The flood of print has turned reading into a process of gulping rather than savoring

- Chappell, Warren

Best Quotes about Books - reading

The good of a book lies in its being read. A book is made up of signs that speak of other signs, which in their turn speak of things. Without an eye to read them, a book contains signs that produce no concepts; therefore it is dumb.

Eco, Umberto

It is from books that wise people derive consolation in the troubles of life.

Hugo, Victor

The real risks for any artist are taken in pushing the work to the limits of what is possible, in the attempt to increase the sum of what it is possible to think. Books become good when they go to this edge and risk falling over it --when they endanger the artist by reason of what he has, or has not, artistically dared.

Rushdie, Salman

People are much more willing to lend you books than bookcases.

Twain, Mark

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

Lowell, James Russell

A novel is never anything, but a philosophy put into images.

Camus, Albert

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

The reading of all good books is like a conversation with all the finest men of past centuries.

Descartes, Rene

A wicked book cannot repent.

Proverb

10.

The book salesman should be honored because he brings to our attention, as a rule, the very books we need most and neglect most.

Crane, Frank

11.

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

Lee, Harper

12.

'Tis the good reader that makes the good book; in every book he finds passages which seem to be confidences or sides hidden from all else and unmistakably meant for his ear; the profit of books is according to the sensibility of the reader; the profound thought or passion sleeps as in a mine, until it is discovered by an equal mind and heart.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

13.

The words of my book nothing, the drift of it everything.

Whitman, Walt

14.

When we read a story, we inhabit it. The covers of the book are like a roof and four walls. What is to happen next will take place within the four walls of the story. And this is possible because the story's voice makes everything its own.

Berger, John

15.

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

16.

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

Rohn, Jim

17.

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

Vaneigem, Raoul

18.

A good title is the title of a successful book.

Chandler, Raymond

19.

The greatest gift is the passion for reading. It is cheap, it consoles, it distracts, it excites, it gives you knowledge of the world and experience of a wide kind. It is a moral illumination.

Hardwick, Elizabeth

20.

Fiction reveals truth that reality obscures.

West, Jessamyn

21.

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

Pound, Ezra

22.

If a secret history of books could be written, and the author's private thoughts and meanings noted down alongside of his story, how many insipid volumes would become interesting, and dull tales excite the reader!

Thackeray, William M.

23.

There is no robber worse than a bad book.

Proverb, Italian

24.

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

Mccay, James T.

25.

Reading the Scriptures is an uplifting experience.

26.

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

Gibbon, Edward

27.

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

28.

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

29.

The books we think we ought to read are poky, dull, and dry; The books that we would like to read we are ashamed to buy; The books that people talk about we never can recall; And the books that people give us, oh, they're the worst of all.

Wells, Carolyn

30.

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

Howells, William Dean

31.

You are wise, witty and wonderful, but you spend too much time reading this sort of stuff.

Critchfield, Jim

32.

There are worse crimes than burning books. One of them is not reading them.

Brodsky, Joseph

33.

The chief knowledge that a man gets from reading books is the knowledge that very few of them are worth reading.

Mencken, H. L.

34.

There are books so alive that you're always afraid that while you weren't reading, the book has gone and changed, has shifted like a river; while you went on living, it went on living too, and like a river moved on and moved away. No one has stepped twice into the same river. But did anyone ever step twice into the same book?

Tsvetaeva, Marina

35.

The books one has written in the past have two surprises in store: one couldn't write them again, and wouldn't want to.

Rostand, Jean

36.

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

37.

The age of the book is almost gone.

Steiner, George

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.

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.

40.

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

41.

What is reading, but silent conversation.

Landor, Walter Savage

42.

Everything in the world exists to end up in a book.

Mallarme, Stephane

43.

The books that everybody admires are those that nobody reads.

France, Anatole

44.

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

45.

Read nothing that you do not care to remember, and remember nothing you do not mean to use.

Blackie, Professor

46.

A real book is not one that we read, but one that reads us.

Auden, W. H.

47.

We ought to reverence books; to look on them as useful and mighty things. If they are good and true, whether they are about religion, politics, farming, trade, law, or medicine, they are the message of Christ, the maker of all things -- the teacher of all truth.

Kingsley, Charles

48.

There is no such thing as a moral book or an immoral book. Books are well written or badly written. That is all.

Wilde, Oscar

49.

Of all the ways of acquiring books, writing them oneself is regarded as the most praiseworthy method. Writers are really people who write books not because they are poor, but because they are dissatisfied with the books which they could buy but do not like.

Benjamin, Walter

50.

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