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

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

Frost, Robert

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

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

Twain, Mark

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

The failure to read good books both enfeebles the vision and strengthens our most fatal tendency --the belief that the here and now is all there is.

Bloom, Allan

All the known world, excepting only savage nations, is governed by books.

Voltaire

A conventional good read is usually a bad read, a relaxing bath in what we know already. A true good read is surely an act of innovative creation in which we, the readers, become conspirators.

Bradbury, Malcolm

The only books that influence us are those for which we are ready, and which have gone a little farther down our particular path than we have yet got ourselves.

Forster, Edward M.

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

Parker, Dorothy

10.

There is creative reading as well as creative writing.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

11.

Who kills a man kills a reasonable creature, God's image, but thee who destroys a good book, kills reason itself.

Milton, John

12.

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

13.

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

Maclennan, Hugh

14.

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

15.

You can either read something many times in order to be assured that you got it all, or else you can define your purpose and use techniques which will assure that you have met it and gotten what you need.

Kump, Peter

16.

Today a reader, tomorrow a leader.

Fusselman, W.

17.

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

Brodsky, Joseph

18.

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

19.

Our high respect for a well read person is praise enough for literature.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

20.

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

Vaneigem, Raoul

21.

The worst readers are those who behave like plundering troops: they take away a few things they can use, dirty and confound the remainder, and revile the whole.

Nietzsche, Friedrich

22.

A book that is shut is but a block.

Fuller, Thomas

23.

There is no robber worse than a bad book.

Proverb, Italian

24.

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

Proverb, American

25.

Books, like friends, should be few and well chosen. Like friends, too, we should return to them again and again for, like true friends, they will never fail us -- never cease to instruct -- never cloy.

Colton, Charles Caleb

26.

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

27.

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

Barstow, Stan

28.

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

29.

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

30.

You should read books like you take medicine, by advice, and not by advertisement.

Ruskin, John

31.

A wicked book cannot repent.

Proverb

32.

Books had instant replay long before televised sports.

Williams, Bert

33.

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

34.

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

35.

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

Rohn, Jim

36.

A bibliophile of little means is likely to suffer often. Books don't slip from his hands but fly past him through the air, high as birds, high as prices.

Neruda, Pablo

37.

I heard his library burned down and both books were destroyed -- and one of them hadn't even been colored in yet.

Dawkins, John

38.

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

Tupper, Martin

39.

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

40.

A book might be written on the injustice of the just.

Hope, Anthony

41.

She could give herself up to the written word as naturally as a good dancer to music or a fine swimmer to water. The only difficulty was that after finishing the last sentence she was left with a feeling at once hollow and uncomfortably full. Exactly like indigestion.

Rhys, Jean

42.

With one day's reading a man may have the key in his hands.

Pound, Ezra

43.

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

Bulwer-Lytton, Edward G.

44.

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

45.

Digressions, incontestably, are the sunshine; they are the life, the soul of reading! Take them out of this book, for instance, --you might as well take the book along with them; --one cold external winter would reign in every page of it; restore them to the writer; --he steps forth like a bridegroom, --bids All-hail; brings in variety, and forbids the appetite to fail.

Sterne, Laurence

46.

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

Locke, John

47.

Readers are plentiful: thinkers are rare.

Martineau, Harriet

48.

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

Hunt, Leigh

49.

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.