Motivational Quotes

Books - reading

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

Best Quotes about Books - reading

I would sooner read a timetable or a catalog than nothing at all.

Maugham, W. Somerset

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

Vaneigem, Raoul

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

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

No story is the same to us after a lapse of time; or rather we who read it are no longer the same interpreters.

Eliot, George

Readers are plentiful: thinkers are rare.

Martineau, Harriet

The Brahmins say that in their books there are many predictions of times in which it will rain. But press those books as strongly as you can, you can not get out of them a drop of water. So you can not get out of all the books that contain the best precepts the smallest good deed.

Tolstoy, Count Leo

Don't just read the easy stuff. You may be entertained by it, but you will never grow from it.

Rohn, Jim

Reading the Scriptures is an uplifting experience.

10.

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

Coolio

11.

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

Bevan, Aneurin

12.

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

13.

There are two kinds of books. Those that no one reads and those that no one ought to read.

Mencken, H. L.

14.

The printing press is either the greatest blessing or the greatest curse of modern times, sometimes one forgets which it is.

Barrie, Sir James M.

15.

I am what libraries and librarians have made me, with little assistance from a professor of Greek and poets.

Sandwell, B. K.

16.

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''

17.

This will never be a civilized country until we expend more money for books than we do for chewing gum.

Hubbard, Elbert

18.

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

19.

There is no robber worse than a bad book.

Proverb, Italian

20.

Happy is he who has laid up in his youth, and held fast in all fortune, a genuine and passionate love for reading.

Choate, Rufus

21.

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

22.

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

Tupper, Martin

23.

There is creative reading as well as creative writing.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

24.

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

25.

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

Dawkins, John

26.

All the best stories in the world are but one story in reality -- the story of escape. It is the only thing which interests us all and at all times, how to escape.

Benson, Arthur Christopher

27.

There are people who read too much: bibliobibuli. I know some who are constantly drunk on books, as other men are drunk on whiskey or religion. They wander through this most diverting and stimulating of worlds in a haze, seeing nothing and hearing nothing.

Mencken, H. L.

28.

How can you dare teach a man to read until you've taught him everything else first?

Shaw, George Bernard

29.

Books, books, books had found the secret of a garret-room piled high with cases in my father's name; Piled high, packed large, --where, creeping in and out among the giant fossils of my past, like some small nimble mouse between the ribs of a mastodon, I nibbled here and there at this or that box, pulling through the gap, in heats of terror, haste, victorious joy, the first book first. And how I felt it beat under my pillow, in the morning's dark. An hour before the sun would let me read! My books!

Browning, Elizabeth Barrett

30.

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

31.

Books and marriage go ill together.

Moliere

32.

A good title is the title of a successful book.

Chandler, Raymond

33.

Everything in this book may be wrong. [The Savior's Manual]

Bach, Richard

34.

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

Forster, Edward M.

35.

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

Locke, John

36.

Fiction reveals truth that reality obscures.

West, Jessamyn

37.

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

38.

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

39.

I feel like I'm drowning. Every night, I'm carrying home loads of things to read but I'm too exhausted. I keep clipping things and Xeroxing them and planning to read them eventually, but I just end up throwing it all away and feeling guilty.

Levine, Ghita

40.

A book may be compared to your neighbor: if it be good, it cannot last too long; if bad, you cannot get rid of it too early.

Brooke, Rupert

41.

A man ought to read just as his inclination leads him; for what he reads as a task will do him little good.

Johnson, Samuel

42.

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.

43.

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

Mencken, H. L.

44.

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

Luther, Martin

45.

Books are the blessed chloroform of the mind.

Chambers, Robert

46.

The books that the world calls immoral are the books that show the world its own shame.

Wilde, Oscar

47.

When you have mastered numbers, you will in fact no longer be reading numbers, any more than you read words when reading books You will be reading meanings.

Geneen, Harold S.

48.

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.

49.

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

50.

Prerequisite for rereadability in books: that they be forgettable.

Rostand, Jean