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

A book worth reading is worth buying.

Ruskin, John

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

Bulwer-Lytton, Edward G.

The constant habit of perusing devout books is so indispensable, that it has been termed the oil of the lamp of prayer. Too much reading, however, and too little meditation, may produce the effect of a lamp inverted; which is extinguished by the very excess of that ailment, whose property is to feed it.

More, Hannah

Read good, big important things.

Noonan, Peggy

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

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

Barstow, Stan

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

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

Parker, Dorothy

An empty book is like an infant's soul, in which anything may be written. It is capable of all things, but containeth nothing. I have a mind to fill this with profitable wonders.

Traherne, Thomas

10.

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

Byron, Lord

11.

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

12.

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

Dawkins, John

13.

In the case of good books, the point is not how many of them you can get through, but rather how many can get through to you.

Adler, Mortimer J.

14.

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

Disraeli, Benjamin

15.

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

16.

A novel points out that the world consists entirely of exceptions.

Carey, Joyce

17.

My books kept me from the ring, the dog-pit, the tavern, and the saloon.

Hood, Thomas

18.

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

Mccay, James T.

19.

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

20.

The books that the world calls immoral are the books that show the world its own shame.

Wilde, Oscar

21.

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.

22.

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.

23.

A wicked book cannot repent.

Proverb

24.

If a secret history of books could be written, and the author's private thoughts and meanings noted down alongside of his story, how many insipid volumes would become interesting, and dull tales excite the reader!

Thackeray, William M.

25.

Cuyler, Theodore L.

26.

No furniture is so charming as books.

Smith, Sydney

27.

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

28.

I am a part of everything that I have read.

Kieran, John

29.

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

Ruskin, John

30.

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

Jackson, Holbrook

31.

The good parts of a book may be only something a writer is lucky enough to overhear or it may be the wreck of his whole damn life --and one is as good as the other.

Hemingway, Ernest

32.

When a book raises your spirit, and inspires you with noble and manly thoughts, seek for no other test of its excellence. It is good, and made by a good workman.

Bruyere, Jean De La

33.

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

34.

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

Twain, Mark

35.

Every man is a volume if you know how to read him.

Channing, William Ellery

36.

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

37.

Very young children eat their books, literally devouring their contents. This is one reason for the scarcity of first editions of Alice in Wonderland and other favorites of the nursery.

Rosenbach, A. S. W.

38.

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

39.

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

Vaneigem, Raoul

40.

Books that you carry to the fire, and hold readily in your hand, are most useful after all.

Johnson, Samuel

41.

When I am dead, I hope it may be said: His sins were scarlet, but his books were read.

Belloc, Hilaire

42.

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

Hope, Anthony

43.

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.

44.

A library is thought in cold storage.

Samuel, Herbert

45.

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

Tupper, Martin

46.

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

47.

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

Camus, Albert

48.

Don't ask me who's influenced me. A lion is made up of the lambs he's digested, and I've been reading all my life.

Seferis, Giorgos

49.

To read too many books is harmful.

Zedong, Mao

50.

Books are lighthouses erected in the great sea of time.