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

Most books, like their authors, are born to die; of only a few books can it be said that death has no dominion over them; they live, and their influence lives forever.

Swartz, J.

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

Bach, Richard

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

Twain, Mark

Without books the development of civilization would have been impossible. They are the engines of change, windows on the world, Lighthouses as the poet said erected in the sea of time. They are companions, teachers, magicians, bankers of the treasures of the mind, Books are humanity in print.

Schopenhauer, Arthur

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

Beware of the person of one book.

Aquinas, St. Thomas

Prerequisite for rereadability in books: that they be forgettable.

Rostand, Jean

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

Hubbard, Elbert

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

10.

For a good book has this quality, that it is not merely a petrifaction of its author, but that once it has been tossed behind, like Deucalion's little stone, it acquires a separate and vivid life of its own.

Lejeune, Caroline

11.

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

12.

I don't think any good book is based on factual experience. Bad books are about things the writer already knew before he wrote them.

Fuentes, Carlos

13.

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

Frost, Robert

14.

When you reread a classic, you do not see more in the book than you did before; you see more in you than there was before.

Fadiman, Clifton

15.

Today a reader, tomorrow a leader.

Fusselman, W.

16.

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

Disraeli, Benjamin

17.

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

Lawrence, D. H.

18.

A real book is not one that we read, but one that reads us.

Auden, W. H.

19.

The books that everybody admires are those that nobody reads.

France, Anatole

20.

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

Mallarme, Stephane

21.

A wicked book cannot repent.

Proverb

22.

A house is not a home unless it contains food and fire for the mind as well as the body.

Fuller, Margaret

23.

A dose of poison can do its work but once. A bad book can go on poisoning minds for generations.

Murray, William

24.

I know every book of mine by its smell, and I have but to put my nose between the pages to be reminded of all sorts of things.

Gissing, George Robert

25.

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

Lytton, Lord Edward

26.

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

Coolio

27.

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

28.

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

Mccay, James T.

29.

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.

30.

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

Parker, Dorothy

31.

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

32.

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

Schopenhauer, Arthur

33.

'Tis the good reader that makes the good book; in every book he finds passages which seem to be confidences or sides hidden from all else and unmistakably meant for his ear; the profit of books is according to the sensibility of the reader; the profound thought or passion sleeps as in a mine, until it is discovered by an equal mind and heart.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

34.

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

Millay, Edna St. Vincent

35.

What gunpowder did for war the printing press has done for the mind.

Phillips, Wendell

36.

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

Porter, Noah

37.

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

Spielberg, Steven

38.

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

39.

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

40.

Books succeed, and lives fail.

Browning, Elizabeth Barrett

41.

There is no robber worse than a bad book.

Proverb, Italian

42.

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

43.

Learning to read has been reduced to a process of mastering a series of narrow, specific, hierarchical skills. Where armed-forces recruits learn the components of a rifle or the intricacies of close order drill by the numbers, recruits to reading learn its mechanics sound by sound and word by word.

Gross, Jacquelyn

44.

There is a set of religious, or rather moral, writings which teach that virtue is the certain road to happiness, and vice to misery in this world. A very wholesome and comfortable doctrine, and to which we have but one objection, namely, that it is not true.

Fielding, Henry

45.

We are too civil to books. For a few golden sentences we will turn over and actually read a volume of four or five hundred pages.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

46.

What is reading, but silent conversation.

Landor, Walter Savage

47.

Who ever converses among old books will be hard to please among the new.

Temple, Sir William

48.

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