Motivational Quotes

Books - reading

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

Best Quotes about Books - reading

To sit alone in the lamplight with a book spread out before you hold intimate converse with men of unseen generations -- such is pleasure beyond compare.

Kenko, Yoshida

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

Millay, Edna St. Vincent

The newest books are those that never grow old.

Jackson, George Holbrook

A multitude of books distracts the mind.

Socrates

Begin to read a book that will help you move toward your dream.

Brown, Les

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

It does not follow because many books are written by persons born in America that there exists an American literature. Books which imitate or represent the thoughts and life of Europe do not constitute an American literature. Before such can exist, an original idea must animate this nation and fresh currents of life must call into life fresh thoughts along the shore.

Fuller, Margaret

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

Rohn, Jim

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

10.

All good books are alike in that they are truer than if they had really happened and after you are finished reading one you will feel that all that happened to you and afterwards it all belongs to you; the good and the bad, the ecstasy, the remorse, and sorrow, the people and the places and how the weather was.

Hemingway, Ernest

11.

I feel like I'm drowning. Every night, I'm carrying home loads of things to read but I'm too exhausted. I keep clipping things and Xeroxing them and planning to read them eventually, but I just end up throwing it all away and feeling guilty.

Levine, Ghita

12.

Every abridgement of a good book is a fool abridged.

Montaigne, Michel Eyquem De

13.

A book may be compared to your neighbor: if it be good, it cannot last too long; if bad, you cannot get rid of it too early.

Brooke, Rupert

14.

Until it is kindled by a spirit as flamingly alive as the one which gave it birth a book is dead to us. Words divested of their magic are but dead hieroglyphs.

Miller, Henry

15.

Books are lighthouses erected in the great sea of time.

Whipple, Edwin P.

16.

The world of books is the most remarkable creation of man nothing else that he builds ever lasts monuments fall; nations perish; civilization grow old and die out; new races build others. But in the world of books are volumes that have seen this happen again and again and yet live on. Still young, still as fresh as the day they were written, still telling men's hearts, of the hearts of men centuries dead.

Day, Clarence

17.

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

18.

Thy books should, like thy friends, not many be, yet such wherein men may thy judgment see.

Wycherley, William

19.

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

Kempis, Thomas

20.

The great American novel has not only already been written, it has already been rejected.

Dane, Frank

21.

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

Chesterton, Gilbert K.

22.

Books are the blessed chloroform of the mind.

Chambers, Robert

23.

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

Morely, John

24.

If I have not read a book before, it is, for all intents and purposes, new to me whether it was printed yesterday or three hundred years ago.

Hazlitt, William

25.

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

26.

A bad book is as much of a labor to write as a good one; it comes as sincerely from the author's soul.

Huxley, Aldous

27.

The Bible remained for me a book of books, still divine -- but divine in the sense that all great books are divine which teach men how to live righteously.

Keith, Sir Arthur

28.

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

Gibbon, Edward

29.

My books are water; those of the great geniuses are wine -- everybody drinks water.

Twain, Mark

30.

The world may be full of fourth-rate writers but it's also full of fourth-rate readers.

Barstow, Stan

31.

This will never be a civilized country until we expend more money for books than we do for chewing gum.

Hubbard, Elbert

32.

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

33.

Books to judicious compilers, are useful; to particular arts and professions, they are absolutely necessary; to men of real science, they are tools: but more are tools to them.

Johnson

34.

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

Descartes, Rene

35.

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

Mallarme, Stephane

36.

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

Harington, John

37.

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

Camus, Albert

38.

There is creative reading as well as creative writing.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

39.

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

40.

Books constitute capital. A library book lasts as long as a house, for hundreds of years. It is not, then, an article of mere consumption but fairly of capital, and often in the case of professional men, setting out in life, it is their only capital.

Jefferson, Thomas

41.

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

Joubert, Joseph

42.

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

43.

As writers become more numerous, it is natural for readers to become more indolent; whence must necessarily arise a desire of attaining knowledge with the greatest possible ease.

Goldsmith, Oliver

44.

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

Maclennan, Hugh

45.

Today a reader, tomorrow a leader.

Fusselman, W.

46.

The reason a writer writes a book is to forget a book and the reason a reader reads one is to remember it.

Wolfe, Thomas

47.

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.

48.

A book is a part of life, a manifestation of life, just as much as a tree or a horse or a star. It obeys its own rhythms, its own laws, whether it be a novel, a play, or a diary. The deep, hidden rhythm of life is always there -- that of the pulse, the heart beat.

Miller, Henry

49.

A good book is the best of friends, the same today and for ever.

Tupper, Martin

50.

Books, books, books had found the secret of a garret-room piled high with cases in my father's name; Piled high, packed large, --where, creeping in and out among the giant fossils of my past, like some small nimble mouse between the ribs of a mastodon, I nibbled here and there at this or that box, pulling through the gap, in heats of terror, haste, victorious joy, the first book first. And how I felt it beat under my pillow, in the morning's dark. An hour before the sun would let me read! My books!

Browning, Elizabeth Barrett