Motivational Quotes

Books - reading

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

Best Quotes about Books - reading

A person who publishes a book appears willfully in public with his pants down.

Millay, Edna St. Vincent

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

Mcluhan, Marshall

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

Milton, John

To feel most beautifully alive means to be reading something beautiful, ready always to apprehend in the flow of language the sudden flash of poetry.

Bachelard, Gaston

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

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

Books are standing counselors and preachers, always at hand, and always disinterested; having this advantage over oral instructors, that they are ready to repeat their lesson as often as we please.

Chambers, Oswald

You've really got to start hitting the books because it's no joke out here.

Lee, Spike

Books are not men and yet they stay alive.

Benet, Stephen Vincent

10.

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.

11.

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

Gibbon, Edward

12.

What is reading, but silent conversation.

Landor, Walter Savage

13.

Read good, big important things.

Noonan, Peggy

14.

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

Chesterton, Gilbert K.

15.

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

16.

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

Vaneigem, Raoul

17.

Today a reader, tomorrow a leader.

Fusselman, W.

18.

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

19.

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.

20.

How many a man has dated a new era in his life from the reading of a book! The book exists for us, perchance, that will explain our miracles and reveal new ones. The at present unutterable things we may find somewhere uttered.

Thoreau, Henry David

21.

All the known world, excepting only savage nations, is governed by books.

Voltaire

22.

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

Howells, William Dean

23.

A real book is not one that we read, but one that reads us.

Auden, W. H.

24.

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

25.

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

Butler, Samuel

26.

A conventional good read is usually a bad read, a relaxing bath in what we know already. A true good read is surely an act of innovative creation in which we, the readers, become conspirators.

Bradbury, Malcolm

27.

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

Adler, Mortimer J.

28.

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

Spielberg, Steven

29.

Books constitute capital. A library book lasts as long as a house, for hundreds of years. It is not, then, an article of mere consumption but fairly of capital, and often in the case of professional men, setting out in life, it is their only capital.

Jefferson, Thomas

30.

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

Wycherley, William

31.

I wish I could write a beautiful book to break those hearts that are soon to cease to exist: a book of faith and small neat worlds and of people who live by the philosophies of popular songs.

32.

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

Dane, Frank

33.

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

34.

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

35.

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

36.

Books are lighthouses erected in the great sea of time.

Whipple, Edwin P.

37.

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.

38.

Most books today seemed to have been written overnight from books read the day before.

Chamfort, Sebastien-Roch Nicolas De

39.

With one day's reading a man may have the key in his hands.

Pound, Ezra

40.

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

Hugo, Victor

41.

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

Brookner, Anita

42.

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

Joubert, Joseph

43.

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

44.

The books we think we ought to read are poky, dull, and dry; The books that we would like to read we are ashamed to buy; The books that people talk about we never can recall; And the books that people give us, oh, they're the worst of all.

Wells, Carolyn

45.

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

Parker, Dorothy

46.

I always begin at the left with the opening word of the sentence and read toward the right and I recommend this method.

Thurber, James

47.

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

Frost, Robert

48.

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

Luther, Martin

49.

A vacuum of ideas affects people differently than a vacuum of air, otherwise readers of books would be constantly collapsing.

Lichtenberg, Georg C.

50.

Books are the best of things if well used; if abused, among the worst. They are good for nothing but to inspire. I had better never see a book than be warped by its attraction clean out of my own orbit, and made a satellite instead of a system.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo