Motivational Quotes

Books - reading

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

- Descartes, Rene

Best Quotes about Books - reading

Reading a book is like re-writing it for yourself. You bring to a novel, anything you read, all your experience of the world. You bring your history and you read it in your own terms.

Carter, Angela

The age of the book is almost gone.

Steiner, George

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

Hope, Anthony

The reason a writer writes a book is to forget a book and the reason a reader reads one is to remember it.

Wolfe, Thomas

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

Brown, Les

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.

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

Temple, Sir William

If I have not read a book before, it is, for all intents and purposes, new to me whether it was printed yesterday or three hundred years ago.

Hazlitt, William

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

10.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

11.

A book that is shut is but a block.

Fuller, Thomas

12.

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

Frost, Robert

13.

There are very many people who read simply to prevent themselves from thinking.

Lichtenberg, Georg C.

14.

A library is thought in cold storage.

Samuel, Herbert

15.

A novel is a mirror carried along a main road.

Stendhal, Henri B.

16.

The most foolish kind of a book is a kind of leaky boat on the sea of wisdom; some of the wisdom will get in anyhow.

Holmes, Oliver Wendell

17.

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

18.

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

Morely, John

19.

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

20.

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

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.

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

Hugo, Victor

23.

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

Twain, Mark

24.

Then I though of reading -- the nice and subtle happiness of reading ... this joy not dulled by age, this polite and unpunishable vice, this selfish, serene, lifelong intoxication.

Smith, Logan Pearsall

25.

In the case of good books, the point is not how many of them you can get through, but rather how many can get through to you.

Adler, Mortimer J.

26.

As writers become more numerous, it is natural for readers to become more indolent; whence must necessarily arise a desire of attaining knowledge with the greatest possible ease.

Goldsmith, Oliver

27.

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

28.

The flood of print has turned reading into a process of gulping rather than savoring

Chappell, Warren

29.

A novel is never anything, but a philosophy put into images.

Camus, Albert

30.

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

31.

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

Twain, Mark

32.

This book is not to be tossed lightly aside, but to be hurled with great force.

Parker, Dorothy

33.

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

34.

Beware of the person of one book.

Aquinas, St. Thomas

35.

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

36.

The oldest books are still only just out to those who have not read them.

Butler, Samuel

37.

You can either read something many times in order to be assured that you got it all, or else you can define your purpose and use techniques which will assure that you have met it and gotten what you need.

Kump, Peter

38.

Hypocrite reader -- my fellow -- my brother!

Baudelaire, Charles

39.

Everything in this book may be wrong. [The Savior's Manual]

Bach, Richard

40.

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

41.

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

42.

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

Descartes, Rene

43.

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

Brodsky, Joseph

44.

What is reading, but silent conversation.

Landor, Walter Savage

45.

What is a diary as a rule? A document useful to the person who keeps it. Dull to the contemporary who reads it and invaluable to the student, centuries afterwards, who treasures it.

Terry, Helen

46.

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

Pound, Ezra

47.

Next, in importance to books are their titles.

Davies, Paul

48.

Ideally a book would have no order to it, and the reader would have to discover his own.

Vaneigem, Raoul

49.

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