Motivational Quotes

Books - reading

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

- Dane, Frank

Best Quotes about Books - reading

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.

The good of a book lies in its being read. A book is made up of signs that speak of other signs, which in their turn speak of things. Without an eye to read them, a book contains signs that produce no concepts; therefore it is dumb.

Eco, Umberto

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

When we read a story, we inhabit it. The covers of the book are like a roof and four walls. What is to happen next will take place within the four walls of the story. And this is possible because the story's voice makes everything its own.

Berger, John

The flood of print has turned reading into a process of gulping rather than savoring

Chappell, Warren

Five daily newspapers arrive in my California driveway. The New York times and the Wall Street Journal are supplemented by three local papers. As for magazines, I read, or at least skim, Business Week, Forbes, The Economist, INC; Industry Week, Fortune. Other subscriptions include Sales and Marketing Management, Modern Health Care, Progressive Grocer, High Tech Business, and Slaon Management Review from MIT. I religiously read Business Tokyo, Asia Week, and Far Eastern Economic Review. I glance at Newsweek and Time ... but I devour the New Republic, Policy Review, Foreign Affairs, The Washington Monthly, and Public Interest. How about books? A dozen or more each month.

Peters, Thomas J.

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

Jackson, Holbrook

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

Fuller, Margaret

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

10.

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

Temple, Sir William

11.

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

Voltaire

12.

Books are those faithful mirrors that reflect to our mind the minds of sages and heroes.

Gibbon, Edward

13.

Hypocrite reader -- my fellow -- my brother!

Baudelaire, Charles

14.

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.

15.

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

16.

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

Whitman, Walt

17.

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

Parker, Dorothy

18.

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

19.

After all manner of professors have done their best for us, the place we are to get knowledge is in books. The true university of these days is a collection of books.

Carlyle, Thomas

20.

Book love... is your pass to the greatest, the purest, and the most perfect pleasure that God has prepared for His creatures.

Trollope, Anthony

21.

Readers are plentiful: thinkers are rare.

Martineau, Harriet

22.

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

23.

A bad book is the worse that it cannot repent. It has not been the devil's policy to keep the masses of mankind in ignorance; but finding that they will read, he is doing all in his power to poison their books.

Kirk, E.N.

24.

One always tends to overpraise a long book, because one has got through it.

Forster, Edward M.

25.

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.

26.

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

Lawrence, D. H.

27.

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

Hope, Anthony

28.

I read the newspaper avidly. It is my one form of continuous fiction.

Bevan, Aneurin

29.

To read well, that is, to read true books in a true spirit, is a noble exercise, and one that will task the reader more than any other exercise which the customs of the day esteem. It requires a training such as the athletes underwent, the steady intention almost of the whole life to this object.

Thoreau, Henry David

30.

No matter how busy you may think you are, you must find time for reading, or surrender yourself to self-chosen ignorance.

Townsend, Atwood H.

31.

There are very many people who read simply to prevent themselves from thinking.

Lichtenberg, Georg C.

32.

A library is thought in cold storage.

Samuel, Herbert

33.

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

Rohn, Jim

34.

Next, in importance to books are their titles.

Davies, Paul

35.

I am what libraries and librarians have made me, with little assistance from a professor of Greek and poets.

Sandwell, B. K.

36.

The newest books are those that never grow old.

Jackson, George Holbrook

37.

What we become depends on what we read after all the professors have finished with us. The greatest university of all is the collection of books.

Carlyle, Thomas

38.

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

39.

A good title is the title of a successful book.

Chandler, Raymond

40.

We ought to reverence books; to look on them as useful and mighty things. If they are good and true, whether they are about religion, politics, farming, trade, law, or medicine, they are the message of Christ, the maker of all things -- the teacher of all truth.

Kingsley, Charles

41.

Beware you be not swallowed up in books! An ounce of love is worth a pound of knowledge.

Wesley, John

42.

Every abridgement of a good book is a fool abridged.

Montaigne, Michel Eyquem De

43.

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

Camus, Albert

44.

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

45.

The power of a text is different when it is read from when it is copied out. Only the copied text thus commands the soul of him who is occupied with it, whereas the mere reader never discovers the new aspects of his inner self that are opened by the text, that road cut through the interior jungle forever closing behind it: because the reader follows the movement of his mind in the free flight of day-dreaming, whereas the copier submits it to command.

Benjamin, Walter

46.

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

Montagu, Lady Mary Wortley

47.

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

Brown, Les

48.

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

49.

How can you dare teach a man to read until you've taught him everything else first?

Shaw, George Bernard

50.

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

Dawkins, John