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

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

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

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

Locke, John

A wicked book cannot repent.

Proverb

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

Hood, Thomas

Thy books should, like thy friends, not many be, yet such wherein men may thy judgment see.

Wycherley, William

The age of the book is almost gone.

Steiner, George

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

The man who does not read books has no advantage over the man that can not read them.

Twain, Mark

10.

The failure to read good books both enfeebles the vision and strengthens our most fatal tendency --the belief that the here and now is all there is.

Bloom, Allan

11.

One half who graduate from college never read another book.

True, Herbert

12.

Hypocrite reader -- my fellow -- my brother!

Baudelaire, Charles

13.

The novel can't compete with cars, the movies, television, and liquor. A guy who's had a good feed and tanked up on good wine gives his old lady a kiss after supper and his day is over. Finished.

Celine, Louis-Ferdinand

14.

To use books rightly, is to go to them for help; to appeal to them when our own knowledge and power fail; to be led by them into wider sight and purer conception than our own, and to receive from them the united sentence of the judges and councils of all time, against our solitary and unstable opinions.

Ruskin, John

15.

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

Frost, Robert

16.

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

17.

A vacuum of ideas affects people differently than a vacuum of air, otherwise readers of books would be constantly collapsing.

Lichtenberg, Georg C.

18.

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

Maugham, W. Somerset

19.

Books are lighthouses erected in the great sea of time.

Whipple, Edwin P.

20.

There is more treasure in books than in all the pirates loot on Treasure Island and best of all, you can enjoy these riches every day of your life.

Disney, Walt

21.

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

22.

I wish I could write a beautiful book to break those hearts that are soon to cease to exist: a book of faith and small neat worlds and of people who live by the philosophies of popular songs.

23.

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

Carlyle, Thomas

24.

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

Harington, John

25.

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

Rohn, Jim

26.

Until I feared I would lose it, I never loved to read. One does not love breathing.

Lee, Harper

27.

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.

28.

What is reading, but silent conversation.

Landor, Walter Savage

29.

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

30.

It does not follow because many books are written by persons born in America that there exists an American literature. Books which imitate or represent the thoughts and life of Europe do not constitute an American literature. Before such can exist, an original idea must animate this nation and fresh currents of life must call into life fresh thoughts along the shore.

Fuller, Margaret

31.

No furniture is so charming as books.

Smith, Sydney

32.

Books and marriage go ill together.

Moliere

33.

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

Millay, Edna St. Vincent

34.

Much reading is an oppression of the mind, and extinguishes the natural candle, which is the reason of so many senseless scholars in the world.

Penn, William

35.

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

36.

For a good book has this quality, that it is not merely a petrifaction of its author, but that once it has been tossed behind, like Deucalion's little stone, it acquires a separate and vivid life of its own.

Lejeune, Caroline

37.

There is no robber worse than a bad book.

Proverb, Italian

38.

Readers are plentiful: thinkers are rare.

Martineau, Harriet

39.

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

Sandwell, B. K.

40.

Fiction reveals truth that reality obscures.

West, Jessamyn

41.

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.

42.

Read good, big important things.

Noonan, Peggy

43.

A book is like a man -- clever and dull, brave and cowardly, beautiful and ugly. For every flowering thought there will be a page like a wet and mangy mongrel, and for every looping flight a tap on the wing and a reminder that wax cannot hold the feathers firm too near the sun.

Steinbeck, John

44.

Prerequisite for rereadability in books: that they be forgettable.

Rostand, Jean

45.

Read as you taste fruit or savor wine, or enjoy friendship, love or life.

Jackson, Holbrook

46.

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

Johnson, Samuel

47.

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

48.

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

Colton, Charles Caleb

49.

I am not a speed reader. I am a speed understander.

Asimov, Isaac

50.

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