Motivational Quotes

Books - reading

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

Best Quotes about Books - reading

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

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

Once we have learned to read, meaning of words can somehow register without consciousness.

Marcel, Anthony

I always like to look on the optimistic side of life, but I am realistic enough to know that life is a complex matter.

Disney, Walt

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

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

The things I want to know are in books; my best friend is the man who'll get me a book I ain't read.

Lincoln, Abraham

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.

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

Forster, Edward M.

10.

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

11.

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

Temple, Sir William

12.

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

13.

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

Bevan, Aneurin

14.

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

15.

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

16.

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

17.

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

Chamfort, Sebastien-Roch Nicolas De

18.

The books we read should be chosen with great care, that they may be, as an Egyptian king wrote over his library, The medicines of the soul.

Hood, Paxton

19.

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

20.

He has only half learned the art of reading who has not added to it the more refined art of skipping and skimming.

Balfour, Arthur James

21.

You should read books like you take medicine, by advice, and not by advertisement.

Ruskin, John

22.

Read, read, read. Read everything-- trash, classics, good and bad, and see how they do it. Just like a carpenter who works as an apprentice and studies the master. Read! You'll absorb it. Then write. If it is good, you'll find out. If it's not, throw it out the window.

Faulkner, William

23.

Beware of the person of one book.

Aquinas, St. Thomas

24.

Beware you be not swallowed up in books! An ounce of love is worth a pound of knowledge.

Wesley, John

25.

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''

26.

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

Phelps, William Lyon

27.

In science read the newest works, in literature read the oldest.

Bulwer-Lytton, Edward G.

28.

What is a diary as a rule? A document useful to the person who keeps it. Dull to the contemporary who reads it and invaluable to the student, centuries afterwards, who treasures it.

Terry, Helen

29.

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

30.

No one can read with profit that which he cannot learn to read with pleasure.

Porter, Noah

31.

When I am dead, I hope it may be said: His sins were scarlet, but his books were read.

Belloc, Hilaire

32.

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

Pound, Ezra

33.

The Bible remained for me a book of books, still divine -- but divine in the sense that all great books are divine which teach men how to live righteously.

Keith, Sir Arthur

34.

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

35.

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

36.

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

37.

One half who graduate from college never read another book.

True, Herbert

38.

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

Vaneigem, Raoul

39.

A novel is never anything, but a philosophy put into images.

Camus, Albert

40.

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

Howells, William Dean

41.

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

Harington, John

42.

A book worth reading is worth buying.

Ruskin, John

43.

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

Rochman, Hazel

44.

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

Sandwell, B. K.

45.

In science, read by preference the newest works. In literature, read the oldest. The classics are always modern.

Lytton, Lord Edward

46.

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

Lichtenberg, Georg C.

47.

Does there, I wonder, exist a being who has read all, or approximately all, that the person of average culture is supposed to have read, and that not to have read is a social sin? If such a being does exist, surely he is an old, a very old man.

Bennett, Arnold

48.

Reading the Scriptures is an uplifting experience.

49.

The more sins you confess, the more books you will sell.

Proverb, American

50.

Nine-tenths of the existing books are nonsense and the clever books are the refutation of that nonsense.

Disraeli, Benjamin