Motivational Quotes

Books - reading

The world of books is the most remarkable creation of man nothing else that he builds ever lasts monuments fall; nations perish; civilization grow old and die out; new races build others. But in the world of books are volumes that have seen this happen again and again and yet live on. Still young, still as fresh as the day they were written, still telling men's hearts, of the hearts of men centuries dead.

- Day, Clarence

Best Quotes about Books - reading

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

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

Wilde, Oscar

Books are the blessed chloroform of the mind.

Chambers, Robert

Old books, you know well, are books of the world's youth, and new books are the fruits of its age.

Holmes, Oliver Wendell

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

Hood, Thomas

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

Phillips, Wendell

No man understands a deep book until he has seen and lived at least part of its contents.

Pound, Ezra

In science, read by preference the newest works. In literature, read the oldest. The classics are always modern.

Lytton, Lord Edward

Books are not men and yet they stay alive.

Benet, Stephen Vincent

10.

The pleasure of reading is doubled when one lives with another who shares the same books.

Mansfield, Katherine

11.

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

Marcel, Anthony

12.

An empty book is like an infant's soul, in which anything may be written. It is capable of all things, but containeth nothing. I have a mind to fill this with profitable wonders.

Traherne, Thomas

13.

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

Shaw, George Bernard

14.

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

15.

Until I feared I would lose it, I never loved to read. One does not love breathing.

Lee, Harper

16.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

17.

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

18.

The good parts of a book may be only something a writer is lucky enough to overhear or it may be the wreck of his whole damn life --and one is as good as the other.

Hemingway, Ernest

19.

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

Chesterton, Gilbert K.

20.

For a good book has this quality, that it is not merely a petrifaction of its author, but that once it has been tossed behind, like Deucalion's little stone, it acquires a separate and vivid life of its own.

Lejeune, Caroline

21.

Education... has produced a vast population able to read but unable to distinguish what is worth reading, an easy prey to sensations and cheap appeals.

Trevelyan, G. M.

22.

Americans will listen, but they do not care to read. War and Peace must wait for the leisure of retirement, which never really comes: meanwhile it helps to furnish the living room. Blockbusting fiction is bought as furniture. Unread, it maintains its value. Read, it looks like money wasted. Cunningly, Americans know that books contain a person, and they want the person, not the book.

Burgess, Anthony

23.

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

24.

Read good, big important things.

Noonan, Peggy

25.

Books are the bees which carry the quickening pollen from one to another mind.

Lowell, James Russell

26.

Books and marriage go ill together.

Moliere

27.

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

Rohn, Jim

28.

Readers are plentiful: thinkers are rare.

Martineau, Harriet

29.

The only books that influence us are those for which we are ready, and which have gone a little farther down our particular path than we have yet got ourselves.

Forster, Edward M.

30.

A multitude of books distracts the mind.

Socrates

31.

A book worth reading is worth buying.

Ruskin, John

32.

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

33.

'Tis the good reader that makes the good book; in every book he finds passages which seem to be confidences or sides hidden from all else and unmistakably meant for his ear; the profit of books is according to the sensibility of the reader; the profound thought or passion sleeps as in a mine, until it is discovered by an equal mind and heart.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

34.

No furniture is so charming as books.

Smith, Sydney

35.

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

Bevan, Aneurin

36.

In any situation, ask yourself: What strengths do I possess that can contribute towards accomplishing something in this situation? Then follow through.

37.

What is reading, but silent conversation.

Landor, Walter Savage

38.

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

Hope, Anthony

39.

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

40.

The things I want to know are in books; my best friend is the man who'll get me a book I ain't read.

Lincoln, Abraham

41.

A person of mature years and ripe development, who is expecting nothing from literature but the corroboration and renewal of past ideas, may find satisfaction in a lucidity so complete as to occasion no imaginative excitement, but young and ambitious students are not content with it. They seek the excitement because they are capable of the growth that it accompanies.

Cooley, Charles Horton

42.

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

Brookner, Anita

43.

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

Hadas, Moses

44.

I always begin at the left with the opening word of the sentence and read toward the right and I recommend this method.

Thurber, James

45.

There are worse crimes than burning books. One of them is not reading them.

Brodsky, Joseph

46.

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

Jackson, Holbrook

47.

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

48.

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

Critchfield, Jim

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.

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