Motivational Quotes

Books - reading

I always like to look on the optimistic side of life, but I am realistic enough to know that life is a complex matter.

- Disney, Walt

Best Quotes about Books - reading

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.

When I am dead, I hope it may be said: His sins were scarlet, but his books were read.

Belloc, Hilaire

There is no robber worse than a bad book.

Proverb, Italian

A library is thought in cold storage.

Samuel, Herbert

The constant habit of perusing devout books is so indispensable, that it has been termed the oil of the lamp of prayer. Too much reading, however, and too little meditation, may produce the effect of a lamp inverted; which is extinguished by the very excess of that ailment, whose property is to feed it.

More, Hannah

Books to judicious compilers, are useful; to particular arts and professions, they are absolutely necessary; to men of real science, they are tools: but more are tools to them.

Johnson

The tools I need for my work are paper, tobacco, food, and a little whiskey.

Faulkner, William

Books and marriage go ill together.

Moliere

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

10.

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

Frost, Robert

11.

The great American novel has not only already been written, it has already been rejected.

Dane, Frank

12.

The real risks for any artist are taken in pushing the work to the limits of what is possible, in the attempt to increase the sum of what it is possible to think. Books become good when they go to this edge and risk falling over it --when they endanger the artist by reason of what he has, or has not, artistically dared.

Rushdie, Salman

13.

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

Lowell, James Russell

14.

I feel a kind of reverence for the first books of young authors. There is so much aspiration in them, so much audacious hope and trembling fear, so much of the heart's history, that all errors and shortcomings are for a while lost sight of in the amiable self assertion of youth.

Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth

15.

The book you don't read won't help.

Rohn, Jim

16.

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

Forster, Edward M.

17.

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

Locke, John

18.

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

19.

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

20.

The multitude of books is a great evil. There is no limit to this fever for writing.

Luther, Martin

21.

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

Marcel, Anthony

22.

The world may be full of fourth-rate writers but it's also full of fourth-rate readers.

Barstow, Stan

23.

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

Dawkins, John

24.

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

Bevan, Aneurin

25.

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

26.

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

27.

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

28.

The books one has written in the past have two surprises in store: one couldn't write them again, and wouldn't want to.

Rostand, Jean

29.

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

30.

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

Jackson, Holbrook

31.

We should be as careful of the books we read, as of the company we keep. The dead very often have more power than the living.

Edwards, Tryon

32.

A multitude of books distracts the mind.

Socrates

33.

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.

34.

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

Temple, Sir William

35.

A good book is the very essence of a good man. His virtues survive in it, while the foibles and faults of his actual life are forgotten. All the goodly company of the excellent and great sit around my table, or look down on me from yonder shelves, waiting patiently to answer my questions and enrich me with their wisdom. A precious book is a foretaste of immortality.

Cuyler, Theodore L.

36.

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

Chesterton, Gilbert K.

37.

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

Wycherley, William

38.

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

39.

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

40.

Every man is a volume if you know how to read him.

Channing, William Ellery

41.

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

42.

Until it is kindled by a spirit as flamingly alive as the one which gave it birth a book is dead to us. Words divested of their magic are but dead hieroglyphs.

Miller, Henry

43.

Early in the morning, at break of day, in all the freshness and dawn of one's strength, to read a book --I call that vicious!

Nietzsche, Friedrich

44.

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

Lytton, Lord Edward

45.

Reading is a basic tool in the living of a good life.

Adler, Mortimer J.

46.

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.

47.

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

Phelps, William Lyon

48.

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

Hugo, Victor

49.

I always like to look on the optimistic side of life, but I am realistic enough to know that life is a complex matter.

Disney, Walt

50.

The words of my book nothing, the drift of it everything.