Motivational Quotes

Books - reading

Readers are less and less seen as mere non-writers, the subhuman other or flawed derivative of the author; the lack of a pen is no longer a shameful mark of secondary status but a positively enabling space, just as within every writer can be seen to lurk, as a repressed but contaminating antithesis, a reader.

- Eagleton, Terry

Best Quotes about Books - reading

I am a part of everything that I have read.

Kieran, John

Next to acquiring good friends, the best acquisition is that of good books.

Colton, Charles Caleb

Reading the Scriptures is an uplifting experience.

Books that you carry to the fire, and hold readily in your hand, are most useful after all.

Johnson, Samuel

Fiction reveals truth that reality obscures.

West, Jessamyn

The mortality of all inanimate things is terrible to me, but that of books most of all.

Howells, William Dean

Books are not men and yet they stay alive.

Benet, Stephen Vincent

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

Lichtenberg, Georg C.

No furniture is so charming as books.

Smith, Sydney

10.

A successful book cannot afford to be more than ten percent new.

Mcluhan, Marshall

11.

My early and invincible love of reading I would not exchange for all the riches of India.

Gibbon, Edward

12.

Prerequisite for rereadability in books: that they be forgettable.

Rostand, Jean

13.

Books are lighthouses erected in the great sea of time.

Whipple, Edwin P.

14.

After all, the world is not a stage -- not to me: nor a theatre: nor a show-house of any sort. And art, especially novels, are not little theatres where the reader sits aloft and watches... and sighs, commiserates, condones and smiles. That's what you want a book to be: because it leaves you so safe and superior, with your two-dollar ticket to the show. And that's what my books are not and never will be. Whoever reads me will be in the thick of the scrimmage, and if he doesn't like it -- if he wants a safe seat in the audience -- let him read someone else.

Lawrence, D. H.

15.

The greatest gift is the passion for reading. It is cheap, it consoles, it distracts, it excites, it gives you knowledge of the world and experience of a wide kind. It is a moral illumination.

Hardwick, Elizabeth

16.

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

Butler, Samuel

17.

Footnotes are the finer-suckered surfaces that allow testicular paragraphs to hold fast to the wider reality of the library.

Baker, Nicholson

18.

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

Mencken, H. L.

19.

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''

20.

Books, like friends, should be few and well chosen. Like friends, too, we should return to them again and again for, like true friends, they will never fail us -- never cease to instruct -- never cloy.

Colton, Charles Caleb

21.

To read too many books is harmful.

Zedong, Mao

22.

A novel points out that the world consists entirely of exceptions.

Carey, Joyce

23.

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

24.

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

Forster, Edward M.

25.

I used to walk to school with my nose buried in a book.

Coolio

26.

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

Twain, Mark

27.

The man who does not read books has no advantage over the man that can not read them.

Twain, Mark

28.

All my good reading, you might say, was done in the toilet. There are passages in Ulysses which can be read only in the toilet -- if one wants to extract the full flavor of their content.

Miller, Henry

29.

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

30.

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

31.

What is important is not to be able to read rapidly, but to be able to decide what not to read.

Mccay, James T.

32.

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

Twain, Mark

33.

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

Dane, Frank

34.

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

35.

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

Lawrence, D. H.

36.

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

Locke, John

37.

A house without books is like a room without windows. No man has a right to bring up his children without surrounding them with books, if he has the means to buy them. It is a wrong to his family. Children learn to read by being in the presence of books. The love of knowledge comes with reading and grows upon it. And the love of knowledge, in a young mind, is almost always a warrant against the inferior excitement of passions and vices.

Mann, Horace

38.

A book is a mirror: If an ass peers into it, you can't expect an apostle to look out.

Lichtenberg, Georg C.

39.

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

40.

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

Frost, Robert

41.

When the book comes out it may hurt you -- but in order for me to do it, it had to hurt me first. I can only tell you about yourself as much as I can face about myself.

Baldwin, James

42.

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

Mallarme, Stephane

43.

It is from books that wise people derive consolation in the troubles of life.

Hugo, Victor

44.

A wicked book cannot repent.

Proverb

45.

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

Lowell, James Russell

46.

Readers are plentiful: thinkers are rare.

Martineau, Harriet

47.

To read well, that is, to read true books in a true spirit, is a noble exercise, and one that will task the reader more than any other exercise which the customs of the day esteem. It requires a training such as the athletes underwent, the steady intention almost of the whole life to this object.

Thoreau, Henry David

48.

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

Pascal, Blaise

49.

There is a set of religious, or rather moral, writings which teach that virtue is the certain road to happiness, and vice to misery in this world. A very wholesome and comfortable doctrine, and to which we have but one objection, namely, that it is not true.

Fielding, Henry

50.

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

Mansfield, Katherine