Motivational Quotes

Books - reading

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

- Dawkins, John

Best Quotes about Books - reading

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

Hugo, Victor

Those who do not read are no better off than those who cannot read.

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

Gibbon, Edward

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

I've never know any trouble than an hour's reading didn't assuage.

Secondat, Charles de

Hypocrite reader -- my fellow -- my brother!

Baudelaire, Charles

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

A bibliophile of little means is likely to suffer often. Books don't slip from his hands but fly past him through the air, high as birds, high as prices.

Neruda, Pablo

The books that everybody admires are those that nobody reads.

France, Anatole

10.

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

Fuller, Margaret

11.

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

12.

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

13.

Any book that helps a child to form a habit of reading, to make reading one of his deep and continuing needs, is good for him.

McKenna, Richard

14.

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

15.

Much reading is an oppression of the mind, and extinguishes the natural candle, which is the reason of so many senseless scholars in the world.

Penn, William

16.

Books give not wisdom where none was before. But where some is, there reading makes it more.

Harington, John

17.

A book worth reading is worth buying.

Ruskin, John

18.

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

19.

A good title is the title of a successful book.

Chandler, Raymond

20.

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.

21.

This is not a book. This is libel, slander, defamation of character. This is not a book, in the ordinary sense of the word. No, this is a prolonged insult, a gob of spit in the face of Art, a kick in the pants to God, Man, Destiny, Time, Love, Beauty... what you will. I am going to sing for you, a little off key perhaps, but I will sing.

Miller, Henry

22.

A book that is shut is but a block.

Fuller, Thomas

23.

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

Colton, Charles Caleb

24.

The classics are only primitive literature. They belong to the same class as primitive machinery and primitive music and primitive medicine.

Leacock, Stephen B.

25.

I divide all readers into two classes: those who read to remember and those who read to forget.

Phelps, William Lyon

26.

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

27.

Read good, big important things.

Noonan, Peggy

28.

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

Locke, John

29.

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

Gibbon, Edward

30.

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

Asimov, Isaac

31.

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

32.

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

33.

Books are men of higher stature; the only men that speak aloud for future times to hear.

Barrett, E.S.

34.

I am a part of everything that I have read.

Kieran, John

35.

Books, like friends, should be few and well chosen. Like friends, too, we should return to them again and again for, like true friends, they will never fail us -- never cease to instruct -- never cloy.

Colton, Charles Caleb

36.

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

37.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

38.

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

39.

There is no robber worse than a bad book.

Proverb, Italian

40.

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

Proverb, American

41.

Books are lighthouses erected in the great sea of time.

Whipple, Edwin P.

42.

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

Temple, Sir William

43.

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

Forster, Edward M.

44.

A book may be compared to your neighbor: if it be good, it cannot last too long; if bad, you cannot get rid of it too early.

Brooke, Rupert

45.

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

46.

With one day's reading a man may have the key in his hands.

Pound, Ezra

47.

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

Brookner, Anita

48.

Books in a large university library system: 2, 000,000. Books in an average large city library: 1 0,000. Average number of books in a chain bookstore: 30, 000. Books in an average neighborhood branch library: 20, 000.

Horowitz, Lois

49.

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

Ruskin, John

50.

You are wise, witty and wonderful, but you spend too much time reading this sort of stuff.

Critchfield, Jim