Motivational Quotes

Books - reading

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

- Chesterton, Gilbert K.

Best Quotes about Books - reading

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

The more sins you confess, the more books you will sell.

Proverb, American

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

Books are the best of things if well used; if abused, among the worst. They are good for nothing but to inspire. I had better never see a book than be warped by its attraction clean out of my own orbit, and made a satellite instead of a system.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

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

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

Chappell, Warren

A book that is shut is but a block.

Fuller, Thomas

The things I want to know are in books; my best friend is the man who'll get me a book I ain't read.

Lincoln, Abraham

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

Pascal, Blaise

10.

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

11.

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

12.

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

Lichtenberg, Georg C.

13.

Reading the Scriptures is an uplifting experience.

14.

Nine-tenths of the existing books are nonsense and the clever books are the refutation of that nonsense.

Disraeli, Benjamin

15.

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

16.

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

Mencken, H. L.

17.

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

Locke, John

18.

In science read the newest works, in literature read the oldest.

Bulwer-Lytton, Edward G.

19.

When you reread a classic, you do not see more in the book than you did before; you see more in you than there was before.

Fadiman, Clifton

20.

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

Descartes, Rene

21.

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

Camus, Albert

22.

A novel must be exceptionally good to live as long as the average cat.

Maclennan, Hugh

23.

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

Millay, Edna St. Vincent

24.

Very young children eat their books, literally devouring their contents. This is one reason for the scarcity of first editions of Alice in Wonderland and other favorites of the nursery.

Rosenbach, A. S. W.

25.

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

26.

I divide all readers into two classes: those who read to remember and those who read to forget.

Phelps, William Lyon

27.

Read as you taste fruit or savor wine, or enjoy friendship, love or life.

Jackson, Holbrook

28.

When I get a little money, I buy books; and if any is left I buy food and clothes.

Erasmus, Desiderius

29.

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

30.

What is reading, but silent conversation.

Landor, Walter Savage

31.

Reading is to the mind what exercise is to the body. It is wholesome and bracing for the mind to have its faculties kept on the stretch.

Steele, Sir Richard

32.

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

33.

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

34.

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

Hadas, Moses

35.

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

Lee, Spike

36.

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.

37.

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

Morely, John

38.

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

Parker, Dorothy

39.

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

Gibbon, Edward

40.

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

41.

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

Hood, Thomas

42.

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

43.

The age of the book is almost gone.

Steiner, George

44.

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

Joubert, Joseph

45.

How many a man has dated a new era in his life from the reading of a book! The book exists for us, perchance, that will explain our miracles and reveal new ones. The at present unutterable things we may find somewhere uttered.

Thoreau, Henry David

46.

I feel a kind of reverence for the first books of young authors. There is so much aspiration in them, so much audacious hope and trembling fear, so much of the heart's history, that all errors and shortcomings are for a while lost sight of in the amiable self assertion of youth.

Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth

47.

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

48.

A dose of poison can do its work but once. A bad book can go on poisoning minds for generations.

Murray, William

49.

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.

50.

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