Motivational Quotes

Books - reading

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

- Colton, Charles Caleb

Best Quotes about Books - reading

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

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

Books are divided into two classes, the books of the hour and the books of all time.

Ruskin, John

Some books leave us free and some books make us free.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

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.

Only a generation of readers will span a generation of writers.

Spielberg, Steven

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

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

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

Locke, John

10.

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.

11.

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

Wesley, John

12.

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

Brodsky, Joseph

13.

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

14.

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

Forster, Edward M.

15.

Books give not wisdom where none was before. But where some is, there reading makes it more.

Harington, John

16.

You will be the same person in five as you are today except for the people you meet and the books you read.

Jones, Charles ''Tremendous''

17.

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

18.

He had read much, if one considers his long life; but his contemplation was much more than his reading. He was wont to say that if he had read as much as other men he should have known no more than other men.

Aubrey, John

19.

Next, in importance to books are their titles.

Davies, Paul

20.

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

Pascal, Blaise

21.

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

22.

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

23.

I am a part of everything that I have read.

Kieran, John

24.

Books are not absolutely dead things, but do contain a certain potency of life in them, to be as active as the soul whose progeny they are; they preserve, as in a vial, the purest efficacy and extraction of the living intellect that bred them.

Milton, John

25.

In any situation, ask yourself: What strengths do I possess that can contribute towards accomplishing something in this situation? Then follow through.

26.

To read too many books is harmful.

Zedong, Mao

27.

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

Hunt, Leigh

28.

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

29.

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

30.

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

31.

The man who does not read books has no advantage over the man that can not read them.

Twain, Mark

32.

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

Bevan, Aneurin

33.

A library is thought in cold storage.

Samuel, Herbert

34.

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

35.

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

Lawrence, D. H.

36.

The book you don't read won't help.

Rohn, Jim

37.

All the best stories in the world are but one story in reality -- the story of escape. It is the only thing which interests us all and at all times, how to escape.

Benson, Arthur Christopher

38.

When the book comes out it may hurt you -- but in order for me to do it, it had to hurt me first. I can only tell you about yourself as much as I can face about myself.

Baldwin, James

39.

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

40.

Education... has produced a vast population able to read but unable to distinguish what is worth reading, an easy prey to sensations and cheap appeals.

Trevelyan, G. M.

41.

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

Lichtenberg, Georg C.

42.

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

Mccay, James T.

43.

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

Coolio

44.

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

45.

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

Sandwell, B. K.

46.

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

Chappell, Warren

47.

You will, I am sure, agree with me that... if page 534 only finds us in the second chapter, the length of the first one must have been really intolerable.

Doyle, Sir Arthur Conan

48.

Books had instant replay long before televised sports.

Williams, Bert

49.

A vacuum of ideas affects people differently than a vacuum of air, otherwise readers of books would be constantly collapsing.

Lichtenberg, Georg C.

50.

A multitude of books distracts the mind.

Socrates