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

What is reading, but silent conversation.

Landor, Walter Savage

Without books the development of civilization would have been impossible. They are the engines of change, windows on the world, Lighthouses as the poet said erected in the sea of time. They are companions, teachers, magicians, bankers of the treasures of the mind, Books are humanity in print.

Schopenhauer, Arthur

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

Porter, Noah

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

Secondat, Charles de

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

Thank you for sending me a copy of your book -- I'll waste no time reading it.

Hadas, Moses

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

Here, my dear Lucy, hide these books. Quick, quick! Fling Peregrine Pickle under the toilette --throw Roderick Random into the closet --put The Innocent Adultery into The Whole Duty of Man; thrust Lord Aimworth under the sofa! cram Ovid behind the bolster; there --put The Man of Feeling into your pocket. Now for them.

Sheridan, Richard Brinsley

Books succeed, and lives fail.

Browning, Elizabeth Barrett

10.

Books in a large university library system: 2, 000,000. Books in an average large city library: 1 0,000. Average number of books in a chain bookstore: 30, 000. Books in an average neighborhood branch library: 20, 000.

Horowitz, Lois

11.

Books that you carry to the fire, and hold readily in your hand, are most useful after all.

Johnson, Samuel

12.

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

Maugham, W. Somerset

13.

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

14.

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

Tupper, Martin

15.

Readers are plentiful: thinkers are rare.

Martineau, Harriet

16.

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

Camus, Albert

17.

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

Belloc, Hilaire

18.

You will, I am sure, agree with me that... if page 534 only finds us in the second chapter, the length of the first one must have been really intolerable.

Doyle, Sir Arthur Conan

19.

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

Gibbon, Edward

20.

A book might be written on the injustice of the just.

Hope, Anthony

21.

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

22.

Many books require no thought from those who read them, and for a very simple reason: they made no such demand upon those who wrote them. Those works, therefore, are the most valuable, that set our thinking faculties in the fullest operation. understand them.

Clarendon

23.

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

Chesterton, Gilbert K.

24.

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.

25.

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

26.

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

Mencken, H. L.

27.

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

Vaneigem, Raoul

28.

Then I though of reading -- the nice and subtle happiness of reading ... this joy not dulled by age, this polite and unpunishable vice, this selfish, serene, lifelong intoxication.

Smith, Logan Pearsall

29.

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

30.

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

Lee, Spike

31.

A library is thought in cold storage.

Samuel, Herbert

32.

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

33.

The unread story is not a story; it is little black marks on wood pulp. The reader, reading it, makes it live: a live thing, a story.

Guin, Ursula K. Le

34.

My books kept me from the ring, the dog-pit, the tavern, and the saloon.

Hood, Thomas

35.

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

36.

Our high respect for a well read person is praise enough for literature.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

37.

There is no robber worse than a bad book.

Proverb, Italian

38.

To read well, that is, to read true books in a true spirit, is a noble exercise, and one that will task the reader more than any other exercise which the customs of the day esteem. It requires a training such as the athletes underwent, the steady intention almost of the whole life to this object.

Thoreau, Henry David

39.

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

Millay, Edna St. Vincent

40.

There is no such thing as a moral book or an immoral book. Books are well written or badly written. That is all.

Wilde, Oscar

41.

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

42.

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.

43.

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

44.

After all manner of professors have done their best for us, the place we are to get knowledge is in books. The true university of these days is a collection of books.

Carlyle, Thomas

45.

The flood of print has turned reading into a process of gulping rather than savoring

Chappell, Warren

46.

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

Lichtenberg, Georg C.

47.

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

48.

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

49.

To sit alone in the lamplight with a book spread out before you hold intimate converse with men of unseen generations -- such is pleasure beyond compare.

Kenko, Yoshida

50.

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.