Motivational Quotes

Books - reading

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

Best Quotes about Books - reading

The age of the book is almost gone.

Steiner, George

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

One sheds one's sicknesses in books -- repeats and presents again one's emotions, to be master of them.

Lawrence, D. H.

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.

The chief knowledge that a man gets from reading books is the knowledge that very few of them are worth reading.

Mencken, H. L.

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

Most books, like their authors, are born to die; of only a few books can it be said that death has no dominion over them; they live, and their influence lives forever.

Swartz, J.

Miss a meal if you have to, but don't miss a book.

Rohn, Jim

Everything in the world exists to end up in a book.

Mallarme, Stephane

10.

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

Bevan, Aneurin

11.

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

12.

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

13.

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

14.

A book is like a man -- clever and dull, brave and cowardly, beautiful and ugly. For every flowering thought there will be a page like a wet and mangy mongrel, and for every looping flight a tap on the wing and a reminder that wax cannot hold the feathers firm too near the sun.

Steinbeck, John

15.

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

16.

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

Wycherley, William

17.

You will be the same person in five as you are today except for the people you meet and the books you read.

Jones, Charles ''Tremendous''

18.

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

Gibbon, Edward

19.

A good book is the best of friends, the same today and for ever.

Tupper, Martin

20.

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

Lee, Harper

21.

A bad book is the worse that it cannot repent. It has not been the devil's policy to keep the masses of mankind in ignorance; but finding that they will read, he is doing all in his power to poison their books.

Kirk, E.N.

22.

The books that everybody admires are those that nobody reads.

France, Anatole

23.

Reading is to the mind what exercise is to the body. It is wholesome and bracing for the mind to have its faculties kept on the stretch.

Steele, Sir Richard

24.

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

25.

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

26.

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

27.

Next, in importance to books are their titles.

Davies, Paul

28.

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

Brookner, Anita

29.

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

Forster, Edward M.

30.

Who kills a man kills a reasonable creature, God's image, but thee who destroys a good book, kills reason itself.

Milton, John

31.

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

Spielberg, Steven

32.

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

33.

A wicked book cannot repent.

Proverb

34.

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

Faulkner, William

35.

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

Marcel, Anthony

36.

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

37.

No furniture is so charming as books.

Smith, Sydney

38.

When we read a story, we inhabit it. The covers of the book are like a roof and four walls. What is to happen next will take place within the four walls of the story. And this is possible because the story's voice makes everything its own.

Berger, John

39.

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

Fuller, Margaret

40.

Read good, big important things.

Noonan, Peggy

41.

What is reading, but silent conversation.

Landor, Walter Savage

42.

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

Mansfield, Katherine

43.

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

44.

The books one reads in childhood, and perhaps most of all the bad and good bad books, create in one's mind a sort of false map of the world, a series of fabulous countries into which one can retreat at odd moments throughout the rest of life, and which in some cases can survive a visit to the real countries which they are supposed to represent.

Orwell, George

45.

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

Secondat, Charles de

46.

He that loves a book will never want a faithful friend, a wholesome counselor, a cheerful companion, an effectual comforter. By study, by reading, by thinking, one may innocently divert and pleasantly entertain himself, as in all weathers, as in all fortunes.

Barrow

47.

I can't bear art that you can walk round and admire. A book should be either a bandit or a rebel or a man in the crowd.

Lawrence, D. H.

48.

If a book comes from the heart it will contrive to reach other hearts. All art and author craft are of small account to that.

Carlyle, Thomas

49.

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

50.

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

Barstow, Stan