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

There was a time when the world acted on books; now books act on the world.

Joubert, Joseph

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

Books are not men and yet they stay alive.

Benet, Stephen Vincent

The Bible remained for me a book of books, still divine -- but divine in the sense that all great books are divine which teach men how to live righteously.

Keith, Sir Arthur

Very young children eat their books, literally devouring their contents. This is one reason for the scarcity of first editions of Alice in Wonderland and other favorites of the nursery.

Rosenbach, A. S. W.

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

A good book, in the language of the book-sellers, is a salable one; in that of the curious, a scarce one; in that of men of sense, a useful and instructive one.

Chambers, Oswald

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

Gibbon, Edward

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

10.

A novel must be exceptionally good to live as long as the average cat.

Maclennan, Hugh

11.

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

Hugo, Victor

12.

To read too many books is harmful.

Zedong, Mao

13.

A book that is shut is but a block.

Fuller, Thomas

14.

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

15.

In science read the newest works, in literature read the oldest.

Bulwer-Lytton, Edward G.

16.

Books succeed, and lives fail.

Browning, Elizabeth Barrett

17.

Here, my dear Lucy, hide these books. Quick, quick! Fling Peregrine Pickle under the toilette --throw Roderick Random into the closet --put The Innocent Adultery into The Whole Duty of Man; thrust Lord Aimworth under the sofa! cram Ovid behind the bolster; there --put The Man of Feeling into your pocket. Now for them.

Sheridan, Richard Brinsley

18.

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

Descartes, Rene

19.

I am a part of everything that I have read.

Kieran, John

20.

No furniture is so charming as books.

Smith, Sydney

21.

There is creative reading as well as creative writing.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

22.

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

Camus, Albert

23.

All good books are alike in that they are truer than if they had really happened and after you are finished reading one you will feel that all that happened to you and afterwards it all belongs to you; the good and the bad, the ecstasy, the remorse, and sorrow, the people and the places and how the weather was.

Hemingway, Ernest

24.

Next, in importance to books are their titles.

Davies, Paul

25.

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

26.

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

Leacock, Stephen B.

27.

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

Brookner, Anita

28.

The good of a book lies in its being read. A book is made up of signs that speak of other signs, which in their turn speak of things. Without an eye to read them, a book contains signs that produce no concepts; therefore it is dumb.

Eco, Umberto

29.

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

30.

What is reading, but silent conversation.

Landor, Walter Savage

31.

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

32.

One half who graduate from college never read another book.

True, Herbert

33.

Only a generation of readers will span a generation of writers.

Spielberg, Steven

34.

Everywhere I have sought rest and not found it, except sitting in a corner by myself with a little book.

Kempis, Thomas

35.

Somewhere, everywhere, now hidden, now apparent in what ever is written down, is the form of a human being. If we seek to know him, are we idly occupied?

Woolf, Virginia

36.

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

37.

A dose of poison can do its work but once. A bad book can go on poisoning minds for generations.

Murray, William

38.

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

Hope, Anthony

39.

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

40.

To buy books would be a good thing if we also could buy the time to read them.

Schopenhauer, Arthur

41.

Old books that have ceased to be of service should no more be abandoned than should old friends who have ceased to give pleasure.

Worsthorne, Sir Peregrine

42.

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

Forster, Edward M.

43.

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

Butler, Samuel

44.

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

Asimov, Isaac

45.

Tradition is but a meteor, which, if it once falls, cannot be rekindled. Memory, once interrupted, is not to be recalled. But written learning is a fixed luminary, which, after the cloud that had hidden it has passed away, is again bright in its proper station. So books are faithful repositories, which may be awhile neglected or forgotten, but when opened again, will again impart instruction.

Johnson

46.

Learning to read has been reduced to a process of mastering a series of narrow, specific, hierarchical skills. Where armed-forces recruits learn the components of a rifle or the intricacies of close order drill by the numbers, recruits to reading learn its mechanics sound by sound and word by word.

Gross, Jacquelyn

47.

The last thing one discovers in composing a work is what to put first.

Pascal, Blaise

48.

The novel can't compete with cars, the movies, television, and liquor. A guy who's had a good feed and tanked up on good wine gives his old lady a kiss after supper and his day is over. Finished.

Celine, Louis-Ferdinand

49.

The worst readers are those who behave like plundering troops: they take away a few things they can use, dirty and confound the remainder, and revile the whole.

Nietzsche, Friedrich

50.

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