Motivational Quotes

Books - reading

Some books leave us free and some books make us free.

- Emerson, Ralph Waldo

Best Quotes about Books - reading

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

Hubbard, Elbert

When a book raises your spirit, and inspires you with noble and manly thoughts, seek for no other test of its excellence. It is good, and made by a good workman.

Bruyere, Jean De La

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

Chappell, Warren

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

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

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

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.

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

Gibbon, Edward

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

10.

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

11.

My early and invincible love of reading I would not exchange for all the riches of India.

Gibbon, Edward

12.

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

Tupper, Martin

13.

A novel is a mirror carried along a main road.

Stendhal, Henri B.

14.

Books and marriage go ill together.

Moliere

15.

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

16.

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

Schopenhauer, Arthur

17.

A successful book cannot afford to be more than ten percent new.

Mcluhan, Marshall

18.

Tradition is but a meteor, which, if it once falls, cannot be rekindled. Memory, once interrupted, is not to be recalled. But written learning is a fixed luminary, which, after the cloud that had hidden it has passed away, is again bright in its proper station. So books are faithful repositories, which may be awhile neglected or forgotten, but when opened again, will again impart instruction.

Johnson

19.

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

Vaneigem, Raoul

20.

I am a part of everything that I have read.

Kieran, John

21.

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

22.

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

Proverb, American

23.

The only books that influence us are those for which we are ready, and which have gone a little farther down our particular path than we have yet got ourselves.

Forster, Edward M.

24.

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

Jackson, Holbrook

25.

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

26.

Books succeed, and lives fail.

Browning, Elizabeth Barrett

27.

A book is a part of life, a manifestation of life, just as much as a tree or a horse or a star. It obeys its own rhythms, its own laws, whether it be a novel, a play, or a diary. The deep, hidden rhythm of life is always there -- that of the pulse, the heart beat.

Miller, Henry

28.

My books are water; those of the great geniuses are wine -- everybody drinks water.

Twain, Mark

29.

One half who graduate from college never read another book.

True, Herbert

30.

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

Schopenhauer, Arthur

31.

Learning to read has been reduced to a process of mastering a series of narrow, specific, hierarchical skills. Where armed-forces recruits learn the components of a rifle or the intricacies of close order drill by the numbers, recruits to reading learn its mechanics sound by sound and word by word.

Gross, Jacquelyn

32.

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

Critchfield, Jim

33.

People are much more willing to lend you books than bookcases.

Twain, Mark

34.

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

Locke, John

35.

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

36.

This is not a book. This is libel, slander, defamation of character. This is not a book, in the ordinary sense of the word. No, this is a prolonged insult, a gob of spit in the face of Art, a kick in the pants to God, Man, Destiny, Time, Love, Beauty... what you will. I am going to sing for you, a little off key perhaps, but I will sing.

Miller, Henry

37.

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

Harington, John

38.

This book is not to be tossed lightly aside, but to be hurled with great force.

Parker, Dorothy

39.

He that loves a book will never want a faithful friend, a wholesome counselor, a cheerful companion, an effectual comforter. By study, by reading, by thinking, one may innocently divert and pleasantly entertain himself, as in all weathers, as in all fortunes.

Barrow

40.

A bad book is as much of a labor to write as a good one; it comes as sincerely from the author's soul.

Huxley, Aldous

41.

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.

Gissing, George Robert

42.

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

43.

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

44.

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

45.

Books are the best of things if well used; if abused, among the worst. They are good for nothing but to inspire. I had better never see a book than be warped by its attraction clean out of my own orbit, and made a satellite instead of a system.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

46.

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

Marcel, Anthony

47.

Reading is a basic tool in the living of a good life.

Adler, Mortimer J.

48.

I used to walk to school with my nose buried in a book.

Coolio

49.

What we become depends on what we read after all the professors have finished with us. The greatest university of all is the collection of books.