Motivational Quotes

Books - reading

If I had my way books would not be written in English, but in an exceedingly difficult secret language that only skilled professional readers and story-tellers could interpret. Then people like you would have to go to public halls and pay good prices to hear the professionals decode and read the books aloud for you. This plan would have the advantage of scaring off all amateur authors, retired politicians, country doctors and I-Married-a-Midget writers who would not have the patience to learn the secret language.

- Davies, Robertson

Best Quotes about Books - reading

Reading the Scriptures is an uplifting experience.

Hypocrite reader -- my fellow -- my brother!

Baudelaire, Charles

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

Prerequisite for rereadability in books: that they be forgettable.

Rostand, Jean

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

Lawrence, D. H.

I love to lose myself in other men's minds. When I am not walking, I am reading. I cannot sit and think; books think for me.

Lamb, Charles

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

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

Schopenhauer, Arthur

Next to acquiring good friends, the best acquisition is that of good books.

Colton, Charles Caleb

10.

Next, in importance to books are their titles.

Davies, Paul

11.

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

12.

A bad book is as much of a labor to write as a good one; it comes as sincerely from the author's soul.

Huxley, Aldous

13.

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

Dane, Frank

14.

The unread story is not a story; it is little black marks on wood pulp. The reader, reading it, makes it live: a live thing, a story.

Guin, Ursula K. Le

15.

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

Carey, Joyce

16.

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.

17.

My early and invincible love of reading I would not exchange for all the riches of India.

Gibbon, Edward

18.

Davies, Robertson

19.

Everything you need for better future and success has already been written. And guess what? All you have to do is go to the library.

Rohn, Jim

20.

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

Hood, Thomas

21.

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

22.

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

Rohn, Jim

23.

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

Rohn, Jim

24.

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

25.

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

26.

No furniture is so charming as books.

Smith, Sydney

27.

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

Hope, Anthony

28.

A book is a mirror: If an ass peers into it, you can't expect an apostle to look out.

Lichtenberg, Georg C.

29.

Many books require no thought from those who read them, and for a very simple reason: they made no such demand upon those who wrote them. Those works, therefore, are the most valuable, that set our thinking faculties in the fullest operation. understand them.

Clarendon

30.

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

Twain, Mark

31.

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

Wilde, Oscar

32.

The books one reads in childhood, and perhaps most of all the bad and good bad books, create in one's mind a sort of false map of the world, a series of fabulous countries into which one can retreat at odd moments throughout the rest of life, and which in some cases can survive a visit to the real countries which they are supposed to represent.

Orwell, George

33.

No story is the same to us after a lapse of time; or rather we who read it are no longer the same interpreters.

Eliot, George

34.

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.

35.

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''

36.

A library is thought in cold storage.

Samuel, Herbert

37.

There are books so alive that you're always afraid that while you weren't reading, the book has gone and changed, has shifted like a river; while you went on living, it went on living too, and like a river moved on and moved away. No one has stepped twice into the same river. But did anyone ever step twice into the same book?

Tsvetaeva, Marina

38.

I wish I could write a beautiful book to break those hearts that are soon to cease to exist: a book of faith and small neat worlds and of people who live by the philosophies of popular songs.

39.

The mere brute pleasure of reading --the sort of pleasure a cow must have in grazing.

Chesterton, Gilbert K.

40.

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

Murray, William

41.

Does there, I wonder, exist a being who has read all, or approximately all, that the person of average culture is supposed to have read, and that not to have read is a social sin? If such a being does exist, surely he is an old, a very old man.

Bennett, Arnold

42.

One half who graduate from college never read another book.

True, Herbert

43.

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

44.

Readers are plentiful: thinkers are rare.

Martineau, Harriet

45.

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

Gibbon, Edward

46.

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.

47.

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

48.

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

49.

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

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