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

Books had instant replay long before televised sports.

Williams, Bert

Today a reader, tomorrow a leader.

Fusselman, W.

The reading of all good books is like a conversation with all the finest men of past centuries.

Descartes, Rene

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.

You will find most books worth reading are worth reading twice.

Morely, John

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

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

Gibbon, Edward

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

Temple, Sir William

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

Brown, Les

10.

He has only half learned the art of reading who has not added to it the more refined art of skipping and skimming.

Balfour, Arthur James

11.

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

12.

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

Carey, Joyce

13.

Reading makes immigrants of us all. It takes us away from home, but more important, it finds homes for us everywhere.

Rochman, Hazel

14.

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

Erasmus, Desiderius

15.

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

16.

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

17.

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

18.

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

Auden, W. H.

19.

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

20.

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

Rohn, Jim

21.

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

Twain, Mark

22.

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

23.

Books are not men and yet they stay alive.

Benet, Stephen Vincent

24.

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

25.

You will, I am sure, agree with me that... if page 534 only finds us in the second chapter, the length of the first one must have been really intolerable.

Doyle, Sir Arthur Conan

26.

Reading furnishes the mind only with material for knowledge; it is thinking that makes what we read ours.

Locke, John

27.

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

Hubbard, Elbert

28.

Digressions, incontestably, are the sunshine; they are the life, the soul of reading! Take them out of this book, for instance, --you might as well take the book along with them; --one cold external winter would reign in every page of it; restore them to the writer; --he steps forth like a bridegroom, --bids All-hail; brings in variety, and forbids the appetite to fail.

Sterne, Laurence

29.

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

30.

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

Gibbon, Edward

31.

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

Hugo, Victor

32.

The age of the book is almost gone.

Steiner, George

33.

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

34.

The lessons taught in great books are misleading. The commerce in life is rarely so simple and never so just.

Brookner, Anita

35.

The best effect of any book, is that it excites the reader to self-activity.

Carlyle, Thomas

36.

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

Porter, Noah

37.

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

Hood, Thomas

38.

Thy books should, like thy friends, not many be, yet such wherein men may thy judgment see.

Wycherley, William

39.

No furniture is so charming as books.

Smith, Sydney

40.

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

41.

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

42.

Thank you for sending me a copy of your book -- I'll waste no time reading it.

Hadas, Moses

43.

The books we think we ought to read are poky, dull, and dry; The books that we would like to read we are ashamed to buy; The books that people talk about we never can recall; And the books that people give us, oh, they're the worst of all.

Wells, Carolyn

44.

The books we read should be chosen with great care, that they may be, as an Egyptian king wrote over his library, The medicines of the soul.

Hood, Paxton

45.

The reading or non-reading a book will never keep down a single petticoat.

Byron, Lord

46.

A conventional good read is usually a bad read, a relaxing bath in what we know already. A true good read is surely an act of innovative creation in which we, the readers, become conspirators.

Bradbury, Malcolm

47.

I feel like I'm drowning. Every night, I'm carrying home loads of things to read but I'm too exhausted. I keep clipping things and Xeroxing them and planning to read them eventually, but I just end up throwing it all away and feeling guilty.

Levine, Ghita

48.

There is more treasure in books than in all the pirates loot on Treasure Island and best of all, you can enjoy these riches every day of your life.

Disney, Walt

49.

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

50.

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

Hope, Anthony