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

Happy is he who has laid up in his youth, and held fast in all fortune, a genuine and passionate love for reading.

Choate, Rufus

A novel must be exceptionally good to live as long as the average cat.

Maclennan, Hugh

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

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

Porter, Noah

My books are water; those of the great geniuses are wine -- everybody drinks water.

Twain, Mark

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

Pascal, Blaise

The worst readers are those who behave like plundering troops: they take away a few things they can use, dirty and confound the remainder, and revile the whole.

Nietzsche, Friedrich

Once we have learned to read, meaning of words can somehow register without consciousness.

Marcel, Anthony

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

10.

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.

11.

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.

12.

Read Homer once, and you can read no more. For all books else appear so mean, and so poor. Verse will seem prose; but still persist to read, and Homer will be all the books you need.

Buckingham, Duke of

13.

Reading is to the mind what exercise is to the body. It is wholesome and bracing for the mind to have its faculties kept on the stretch.

Steele, Sir Richard

14.

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

Bevan, Aneurin

15.

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.

16.

A book that is shut is but a block.

Fuller, Thomas

17.

I am not a speed reader. I am a speed understander.

Asimov, Isaac

18.

Books are not absolutely dead things, but do contain a certain potency of life in them, to be as active as the soul whose progeny they are; they preserve, as in a vial, the purest efficacy and extraction of the living intellect that bred them.

Milton, John

19.

To learn to read is to light a fire; every syllable that is spelled out is a spark.

Hugo, Victor

20.

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

21.

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

Twain, Mark

22.

A good title is the title of a successful book.

Chandler, Raymond

23.

There is no robber worse than a bad book.

Proverb, Italian

24.

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

25.

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

Chesterton, Gilbert K.

26.

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

27.

The successful Accelerated Reader is able to read larger than normal blocks or bites of the printed page with each eye stop. He has accepted, without reservation, the philosophy that the most important benefit of reading is the gaining of information, ideas, mental picture and entertainment-not the fretting over words. He has come to the realization that words in and of themselves are for the most part insignificant.

Cutler, Wade E.

28.

I would sooner read a timetable or a catalog than nothing at all.

Maugham, W. Somerset

29.

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

30.

The more sins you confess, the more books you will sell.

Proverb, American

31.

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

32.

Some books leave us free and some books make us free.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

33.

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

Voltaire

34.

A novel is a mirror carried along a main road.

Stendhal, Henri B.

35.

Our high respect for a well read person is praise enough for literature.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

36.

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

Phillips, Wendell

37.

Some of the most famous books are the least worth reading. Their fame was due to their having done something that needed to be doing in their day. The work is done and the virtue of the book has expired.

Morely, John

38.

It is from books that wise people derive consolation in the troubles of life.

Hugo, Victor

39.

Beware of the person of one book.

Aquinas, St. Thomas

40.

I can't bear art that you can walk round and admire. A book should be either a bandit or a rebel or a man in the crowd.

Lawrence, D. H.

41.

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

Spielberg, Steven

42.

A great book should leave you with many experiences and slightly exhausted at the end. You should live several lives while reading it.

Styron, William

43.

A wicked book cannot repent.

Proverb

44.

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

45.

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

Frost, Robert

46.

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.

47.

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

Erasmus, Desiderius

48.

Hypocrite reader -- my fellow -- my brother!

Baudelaire, Charles

49.

After all, the world is not a stage -- not to me: nor a theatre: nor a show-house of any sort. And art, especially novels, are not little theatres where the reader sits aloft and watches... and sighs, commiserates, condones and smiles. That's what you want a book to be: because it leaves you so safe and superior, with your two-dollar ticket to the show. And that's what my books are not and never will be. Whoever reads me will be in the thick of the scrimmage, and if he doesn't like it -- if he wants a safe seat in the audience -- let him read someone else.

Lawrence, D. H.

50.

The book to read is not the one which thinks for you, but the one which makes you think. No book in the world equals the Bible for that.

Mccosh