Motivational Quotes

Books - reading

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.

Best Quotes about Books - reading

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.

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

Morely, John

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

When you have mastered numbers, you will in fact no longer be reading numbers, any more than you read words when reading books You will be reading meanings.

Geneen, Harold S.

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

To read too many books is harmful.

Zedong, Mao

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

Erasmus, Desiderius

Old books that have ceased to be of service should no more be abandoned than should old friends who have ceased to give pleasure.

Worsthorne, Sir Peregrine

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

10.

Old books, you know well, are books of the world's youth, and new books are the fruits of its age.

Holmes, Oliver Wendell

11.

Any book that helps a child to form a habit of reading, to make reading one of his deep and continuing needs, is good for him.

McKenna, Richard

12.

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

13.

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

14.

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

15.

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

16.

Hypocrite reader -- my fellow -- my brother!

Baudelaire, Charles

17.

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

Whitman, Walt

18.

A house without books is like a room without windows. No man has a right to bring up his children without surrounding them with books, if he has the means to buy them. It is a wrong to his family. Children learn to read by being in the presence of books. The love of knowledge comes with reading and grows upon it. And the love of knowledge, in a young mind, is almost always a warrant against the inferior excitement of passions and vices.

Mann, Horace

19.

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

Parker, Dorothy

20.

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

Ruskin, John

21.

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

22.

Read nothing that you do not care to remember, and remember nothing you do not mean to use.

Blackie, Professor

23.

In science, read by preference the newest works. In literature, read the oldest. The classics are always modern.

Lytton, Lord Edward

24.

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

Pascal, Blaise

25.

'Tis pleasant, sure, to see one's name in print; A book's a book, although there's nothing in it.

Byron, Lord

26.

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

Rohn, Jim

27.

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

28.

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

29.

Reading the Scriptures is an uplifting experience.

30.

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

Mcluhan, Marshall

31.

Until I feared I would lose it, I never loved to read. One does not love breathing.

Lee, Harper

32.

No furniture is so charming as books.

Smith, Sydney

33.

Books succeed, and lives fail.

Browning, Elizabeth Barrett

34.

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

Hadas, Moses

35.

To buy books would be a good thing if we also could buy the time to read them.

Schopenhauer, Arthur

36.

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

37.

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

38.

A book worth reading is worth buying.

Ruskin, John

39.

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

40.

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

Voltaire

41.

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

Porter, Noah

42.

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.

43.

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

Joubert, Joseph

44.

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

45.

A good book, in the language of the book-sellers, is a salable one; in that of the curious, a scarce one; in that of men of sense, a useful and instructive one.

Chambers, Oswald

46.

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

47.

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

Jackson, Holbrook

48.

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''

49.

No entertainment is so cheap as reading, nor is any pleasure so lasting.

Montagu, Lady Mary Wortley

50.

Much reading is an oppression of the mind, and extinguishes the natural candle, which is the reason of so many senseless scholars in the world.