Motivational Quotes

Books - reading

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

- Emerson, Ralph Waldo

Best Quotes about Books - reading

Books are divided into two classes, the books of the hour and the books of all time.

Ruskin, John

The books that everybody admires are those that nobody reads.

France, Anatole

The oldest books are still only just out to those who have not read them.

Butler, Samuel

If I had my way books would not be written in English, but in an exceedingly difficult secret language that only skilled professional readers and story-tellers could interpret. Then people like you would have to go to public halls and pay good prices to hear the professionals decode and read the books aloud for you. This plan would have the advantage of scaring off all amateur authors, retired politicians, country doctors and I-Married-a-Midget writers who would not have the patience to learn the secret language.

Davies, Robertson

Books had instant replay long before televised sports.

Williams, Bert

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

Any book that helps a child to form a habit of reading, to make reading one of his deep and continuing needs, is good for him.

McKenna, Richard

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

Lee, Spike

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

Rochman, Hazel

10.

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

11.

There are books so alive that you're always afraid that while you weren't reading, the book has gone and changed, has shifted like a river; while you went on living, it went on living too, and like a river moved on and moved away. No one has stepped twice into the same river. But did anyone ever step twice into the same book?

Tsvetaeva, Marina

12.

Read nothing that you do not care to remember, and remember nothing you do not mean to use.

Blackie, Professor

13.

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

Frost, Robert

14.

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

15.

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

Lichtenberg, Georg C.

16.

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

17.

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

18.

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

19.

Books are but waste paper unless we spend in action the wisdom we get from thought -- asleep. When we are weary of the living, we may repair to the dead, who have nothing of peevishness, pride, or design in their conversation.

Collier, Jeremy

20.

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

Schopenhauer, Arthur

21.

'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

22.

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

23.

'Tis pleasant, sure, to see one's name in print; A book's a book, although there's nothing in it.

Byron, Lord

24.

You will find most books worth reading are worth reading twice.

Morely, John

25.

Begin to read a book that will help you move toward your dream.

Brown, Les

26.

Americans will listen, but they do not care to read. War and Peace must wait for the leisure of retirement, which never really comes: meanwhile it helps to furnish the living room. Blockbusting fiction is bought as furniture. Unread, it maintains its value. Read, it looks like money wasted. Cunningly, Americans know that books contain a person, and they want the person, not the book.

Burgess, Anthony

27.

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

Chamfort, Sebastien-Roch Nicolas De

28.

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

Forster, Edward M.

29.

I don't think any good book is based on factual experience. Bad books are about things the writer already knew before he wrote them.

Fuentes, Carlos

30.

I can't bear art that you can walk round and admire. A book should be either a bandit or a rebel or a man in the crowd.

Lawrence, D. H.

31.

There are worse crimes than burning books. One of them is not reading them.

Brodsky, Joseph

32.

Books are the bees which carry the quickening pollen from one to another mind.

Lowell, James Russell

33.

When I get a little money, I buy books; and if any is left I buy food and clothes.

Erasmus, Desiderius

34.

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

Proverb, American

35.

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

Temple, Sir William

36.

What is important is not to be able to read rapidly, but to be able to decide what not to read.

Mccay, James T.

37.

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

38.

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

Disraeli, Benjamin

39.

What is the most precious, the most exciting smell awaiting you in the house when you return to it after a dozen years or so? The smell of roses, you think? No, moldering books.

Sinyavsky, Andre

40.

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

Bevan, Aneurin

41.

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

42.

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

Howells, William Dean

43.

You are wise, witty and wonderful, but you spend too much time reading this sort of stuff.

Critchfield, Jim

44.

A novel points out that the world consists entirely of exceptions.

Carey, Joyce

45.

The newest books are those that never grow old.

Jackson, George Holbrook

46.

There is no robber worse than a bad book.

Proverb, Italian

47.

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.

48.

All the known world, excepting only savage nations, is governed by books.

Voltaire

49.

Books are not men and yet they stay alive.

Benet, Stephen Vincent

50.

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