Motivational Quotes

Books - reading

'Tis the good reader that makes the good book; in every book he finds passages which seem to be confidences or sides hidden from all else and unmistakably meant for his ear; the profit of books is according to the sensibility of the reader; the profound thought or passion sleeps as in a mine, until it is discovered by an equal mind and heart.

- Emerson, Ralph Waldo

Best Quotes about Books - reading

Book love... is your pass to the greatest, the purest, and the most perfect pleasure that God has prepared for His creatures.

Trollope, Anthony

A novel is a mirror carried along a main road.

Stendhal, Henri B.

As writers become more numerous, it is natural for readers to become more indolent; whence must necessarily arise a desire of attaining knowledge with the greatest possible ease.

Goldsmith, Oliver

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

Rohn, Jim

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

Twain, Mark

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''

Everything you need for better future and success has already been written. And guess what? All you have to do is go to the library.

Rohn, Jim

The reading or non-reading a book will never keep down a single petticoat.

Byron, Lord

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

Hubbard, Elbert

10.

The books that everybody admires are those that nobody reads.

France, Anatole

11.

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

12.

Every man is a volume if you know how to read him.

Channing, William Ellery

13.

Reading is equivalent to thinking with someone else's head instead of with one's own.

Schopenhauer, Arthur

14.

To buy books would be a good thing if we also could buy the time to read them.

Schopenhauer, Arthur

15.

After all, the world is not a stage -- not to me: nor a theatre: nor a show-house of any sort. And art, especially novels, are not little theatres where the reader sits aloft and watches... and sighs, commiserates, condones and smiles. That's what you want a book to be: because it leaves you so safe and superior, with your two-dollar ticket to the show. And that's what my books are not and never will be. Whoever reads me will be in the thick of the scrimmage, and if he doesn't like it -- if he wants a safe seat in the audience -- let him read someone else.

Lawrence, D. H.

16.

A book that is shut is but a block.

Fuller, Thomas

17.

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

18.

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.

19.

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

20.

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

21.

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

Lee, Spike

22.

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

23.

Readers are plentiful: thinkers are rare.

Martineau, Harriet

24.

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

25.

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

26.

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

Hood, Thomas

27.

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

Barstow, Stan

28.

Reading is to the mind what exercise is to the body. It is wholesome and bracing for the mind to have its faculties kept on the stretch.

Steele, Sir Richard

29.

The most foolish kind of a book is a kind of leaky boat on the sea of wisdom; some of the wisdom will get in anyhow.

Holmes, Oliver Wendell

30.

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

31.

A good book, in the language of the book-sellers, is a salable one; in that of the curious, a scarce one; in that of men of sense, a useful and instructive one.

Chambers, Oswald

32.

In the dark colony of night, when I consider man's magnificent capacity for malice, madness, folly, envy, rage, and destructiveness, and I wonder whether we shall not end up as breakfast for newts and polyps, I seem to hear the muffled cries of all the words in all the books with covers closed.

Rosten, Leo

33.

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.

34.

Every abridgement of a good book is a fool abridged.

Montaigne, Michel Eyquem De

35.

Except a living man there is nothing more wonderful than a book! a message to us from the dead -- from human souls we never saw, who lived, perhaps, thousands of miles away. And yet these, in those little sheets of paper, speak to us, arouse us, terrify us, teach us, comfort us, open their hearts to us as brothers.

Kingsley, Charles

36.

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

Frost, Robert

37.

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

Forster, Edward M.

38.

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

39.

Fiction reveals truth that reality obscures.

West, Jessamyn

40.

A great book should leave you with many experiences and slightly exhausted at the end. You should live several lives while reading it.

Styron, William

41.

If a book comes from the heart it will contrive to reach other hearts. All art and author craft are of small account to that.

Carlyle, Thomas

42.

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

Joubert, Joseph

43.

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

Harington, John

44.

The newest books are those that never grow old.

Jackson, George Holbrook

45.

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.

46.

A book may be compared to your neighbor: if it be good, it cannot last too long; if bad, you cannot get rid of it too early.

Brooke, Rupert

47.

A multitude of books distracts the mind.

Socrates

48.

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

Leacock, Stephen B.

49.

I know every book of mine by its smell, and I have but to put my nose between the pages to be reminded of all sorts of things.