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

Books are not men and yet they stay alive.

Benet, Stephen Vincent

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

The newest books are those that never grow old.

Jackson, George Holbrook

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

Joubert, Joseph

The constant habit of perusing devout books is so indispensable, that it has been termed the oil of the lamp of prayer. Too much reading, however, and too little meditation, may produce the effect of a lamp inverted; which is extinguished by the very excess of that ailment, whose property is to feed it.

More, Hannah

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

Old books that have ceased to be of service should no more be abandoned than should old friends who have ceased to give pleasure.

Worsthorne, Sir Peregrine

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

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

Mansfield, Katherine

10.

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.

11.

Readers are plentiful: thinkers are rare.

Martineau, Harriet

12.

No matter how busy you may think you are, you must find time for reading, or surrender yourself to self-chosen ignorance.

Townsend, Atwood H.

13.

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.

14.

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

Locke, John

15.

Today a reader, tomorrow a leader.

Fusselman, W.

16.

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

Fuller, Margaret

17.

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

18.

A multitude of books distracts the mind.

Socrates

19.

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

Gibbon, Edward

20.

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

Secondat, Charles de

21.

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.

22.

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

Lawrence, D. H.

23.

Very young children eat their books, literally devouring their contents. This is one reason for the scarcity of first editions of Alice in Wonderland and other favorites of the nursery.

Rosenbach, A. S. W.

24.

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

25.

The words of my book nothing, the drift of it everything.

Whitman, Walt

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.

We ought to reverence books; to look on them as useful and mighty things. If they are good and true, whether they are about religion, politics, farming, trade, law, or medicine, they are the message of Christ, the maker of all things -- the teacher of all truth.

Kingsley, Charles

28.

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

Pound, Ezra

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.

Don't ask me who's influenced me. A lion is made up of the lambs he's digested, and I've been reading all my life.

Seferis, Giorgos

31.

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.

32.

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

33.

He had read much, if one considers his long life; but his contemplation was much more than his reading. He was wont to say that if he had read as much as other men he should have known no more than other men.

Aubrey, John

34.

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

35.

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

Colton, Charles Caleb

36.

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.

37.

Surviving and thriving as a professional today demands two new approaches to the written word. First, it requires a new approach to orchestrating information, by skillfully choosing what to read and what to ignore. Second, it requires a new approach to integrating information, by reading faster and with greater comprehension.

Calano, Jimmy

38.

A novel must be exceptionally good to live as long as the average cat.

Maclennan, Hugh

39.

The classics are only primitive literature. They belong to the same class as primitive machinery and primitive music and primitive medicine.

Leacock, Stephen B.

40.

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''

41.

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

Twain, Mark

42.

Reading makes immigrants of us all. It takes us away from home, but more important, it finds homes for us everywhere.

Rochman, Hazel

43.

I divide all readers into two classes: those who read to remember and those who read to forget.

Phelps, William Lyon

44.

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.

45.

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

46.

The best effect of any book, is that it excites the reader to self-activity.

Carlyle, Thomas

47.

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

Spielberg, Steven

48.

A novel is a mirror carried along a main road.

Stendhal, Henri B.

49.

A bad book is as much of a labor to write as a good one; it comes as sincerely from the author's soul.