Motivational Quotes

Books - reading

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

Best Quotes about 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

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

Porter, Noah

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

Schopenhauer, Arthur

Read good, big important things.

Noonan, Peggy

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

A library is thought in cold storage.

Samuel, Herbert

Next, in importance to books are their titles.

Davies, Paul

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

Disraeli, Benjamin

Fiction reveals truth that reality obscures.

West, Jessamyn

10.

Beware you be not swallowed up in books! An ounce of love is worth a pound of knowledge.

Wesley, John

11.

The reason that fiction is more interesting than any other form of literature, to those who really like to study people, is that in fiction the author can really tell the truth without humiliating himself.

Roosevelt, Eleanor

12.

The book to read is not the one which thinks for you, but the one which makes you think. No book in the world equals the Bible for that.

Mccosh

13.

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

Jackson, Holbrook

14.

Books are lighthouses erected in the great sea of time.

Whipple, Edwin P.

15.

A wicked book cannot repent.

Proverb

16.

To feel most beautifully alive means to be reading something beautiful, ready always to apprehend in the flow of language the sudden flash of poetry.

Bachelard, Gaston

17.

A novel is a mirror carried along a main road.

Stendhal, Henri B.

18.

God be thanked for books; they are the voices of the distant and the dead, and make us heirs of the spiritual life of past ages.

Channing, William Ellery

19.

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.

20.

Hypocrite reader -- my fellow -- my brother!

Baudelaire, Charles

21.

If I had my way books would not be written in English, but in an exceedingly difficult secret language that only skilled professional readers and story-tellers could interpret. Then people like you would have to go to public halls and pay good prices to hear the professionals decode and read the books aloud for you. This plan would have the advantage of scaring off all amateur authors, retired politicians, country doctors and I-Married-a-Midget writers who would not have the patience to learn the secret language.

Davies, Robertson

22.

No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader.

Frost, Robert

23.

I would sooner read a timetable or a catalog than nothing at all.

Maugham, W. Somerset

24.

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.

25.

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

Pascal, Blaise

26.

The newest books are those that never grow old.

Jackson, George Holbrook

27.

Does there, I wonder, exist a being who has read all, or approximately all, that the person of average culture is supposed to have read, and that not to have read is a social sin? If such a being does exist, surely he is an old, a very old man.

Bennett, Arnold

28.

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

Bach, Richard

29.

A bad book is the worse that it cannot repent. It has not been the devil's policy to keep the masses of mankind in ignorance; but finding that they will read, he is doing all in his power to poison their books.

Kirk, E.N.

30.

There is more treasure in books than in all the pirates loot on Treasure Island and best of all, you can enjoy these riches every day of your life.

Disney, Walt

31.

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

32.

The unread story is not a story; it is little black marks on wood pulp. The reader, reading it, makes it live: a live thing, a story.

Guin, Ursula K. Le

33.

I can't bear art that you can walk round and admire. A book should be either a bandit or a rebel or a man in the crowd.

Lawrence, D. H.

34.

What is the most precious, the most exciting smell awaiting you in the house when you return to it after a dozen years or so? The smell of roses, you think? No, moldering books.

Sinyavsky, Andre

35.

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

36.

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

Colton, Charles Caleb

37.

A good book is the very essence of a good man. His virtues survive in it, while the foibles and faults of his actual life are forgotten. All the goodly company of the excellent and great sit around my table, or look down on me from yonder shelves, waiting patiently to answer my questions and enrich me with their wisdom. A precious book is a foretaste of immortality.

Cuyler, Theodore L.

38.

A successful book cannot afford to be more than ten percent new.

Mcluhan, Marshall

39.

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

Critchfield, Jim

40.

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

Whitman, Walt

41.

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

Proverb, American

42.

To use books rightly, is to go to them for help; to appeal to them when our own knowledge and power fail; to be led by them into wider sight and purer conception than our own, and to receive from them the united sentence of the judges and councils of all time, against our solitary and unstable opinions.

Ruskin, John

43.

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

Byron, Lord

44.

Books that you carry to the fire, and hold readily in your hand, are most useful after all.

Johnson, Samuel

45.

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

Pound, Ezra

46.

What is reading, but silent conversation.

Landor, Walter Savage

47.

Many books require no thought from those who read them, and for a very simple reason: they made no such demand upon those who wrote them. Those works, therefore, are the most valuable, that set our thinking faculties in the fullest operation. understand them.

Clarendon

48.

Do we write books so that they shall merely be read? Don't we also write them for employment in the household? For one that is read from start to finish, thousands are leafed through, other thousands lie motionless, others are jammed against mouseholes, thrown at rats, others are stood on, sat on, drummed on, have gingerbread baked on them or are used to light pipes.

Lichtenberg, Georg C.

49.

Surviving and thriving as a professional today demands two new approaches to the written word. First, it requires a new approach to orchestrating information, by skillfully choosing what to read and what to ignore. Second, it requires a new approach to integrating information, by reading faster and with greater comprehension.

Calano, Jimmy

50.

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

Phelps, William Lyon