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

What is the most precious, the most exciting smell awaiting you in the house when you return to it after a dozen years or so? The smell of roses, you think? No, moldering books.

Sinyavsky, Andre

A novel is a mirror carried along a main road.

Stendhal, Henri B.

The book you don't read won't help.

Rohn, Jim

There are worse crimes than burning books. One of them is not reading them.

Brodsky, Joseph

The power of a text is different when it is read from when it is copied out. Only the copied text thus commands the soul of him who is occupied with it, whereas the mere reader never discovers the new aspects of his inner self that are opened by the text, that road cut through the interior jungle forever closing behind it: because the reader follows the movement of his mind in the free flight of day-dreaming, whereas the copier submits it to command.

Benjamin, Walter

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.

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

Wilde, Oscar

Today a reader, tomorrow a leader.

Fusselman, W.

It is books that teach us to refine our pleasures when young, and to recall them with satisfaction when we are old.

Hunt, Leigh

10.

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

11.

You will find most books worth reading are worth reading twice.

Morely, John

12.

One half who graduate from college never read another book.

True, Herbert

13.

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

14.

Books are divided into two classes, the books of the hour and the books of all time.

Ruskin, John

15.

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

Twain, Mark

16.

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

17.

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.

18.

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

Secondat, Charles de

19.

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

Frost, Robert

20.

I feel a kind of reverence for the first books of young authors. There is so much aspiration in them, so much audacious hope and trembling fear, so much of the heart's history, that all errors and shortcomings are for a while lost sight of in the amiable self assertion of youth.

Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth

21.

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

Lichtenberg, Georg C.

22.

Beware of the person of one book.

Aquinas, St. Thomas

23.

I am a part of everything that I have read.

Kieran, John

24.

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

25.

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

Hubbard, Elbert

26.

If I had my way books would not be written in English, but in an exceedingly difficult secret language that only skilled professional readers and story-tellers could interpret. Then people like you would have to go to public halls and pay good prices to hear the professionals decode and read the books aloud for you. This plan would have the advantage of scaring off all amateur authors, retired politicians, country doctors and I-Married-a-Midget writers who would not have the patience to learn the secret language.

Davies, Robertson

27.

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

28.

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

Dawkins, John

29.

There is no robber worse than a bad book.

Proverb, Italian

30.

Fiction reveals truth that reality obscures.

West, Jessamyn

31.

A good book is the very essence of a good man. His virtues survive in it, while the foibles and faults of his actual life are forgotten. All the goodly company of the excellent and great sit around my table, or look down on me from yonder shelves, waiting patiently to answer my questions and enrich me with their wisdom. A precious book is a foretaste of immortality.

Cuyler, Theodore L.

32.

Books give not wisdom where none was before. But where some is, there reading makes it more.

Harington, John

33.

If a secret history of books could be written, and the author's private thoughts and meanings noted down alongside of his story, how many insipid volumes would become interesting, and dull tales excite the reader!

Thackeray, William M.

34.

What is reading, but silent conversation.

Landor, Walter Savage

35.

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

Butler, Samuel

36.

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

37.

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

38.

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

39.

What we become depends on what we read after all the professors have finished with us. The greatest university of all is the collection of books.

Carlyle, Thomas

40.

Who ever converses among old books will be hard to please among the new.

Temple, Sir William

41.

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

42.

Every abridgement of a good book is a fool abridged.

Montaigne, Michel Eyquem De

43.

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

Faulkner, William

44.

Books had instant replay long before televised sports.

Williams, Bert

45.

No entertainment is so cheap as reading, nor is any pleasure so lasting.

Montagu, Lady Mary Wortley

46.

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

47.

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

Barstow, Stan

48.

Reading the Scriptures is an uplifting experience.

49.

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

Mencken, H. L.

50.

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