Motivational Quotes

Books - reading

We are too civil to books. For a few golden sentences we will turn over and actually read a volume of four or five hundred pages.

- Emerson, Ralph Waldo

Best Quotes about Books - reading

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

Proverb, American

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.

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

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

Voltaire

The tools I need for my work are paper, tobacco, food, and a little whiskey.

Faulkner, William

The real risks for any artist are taken in pushing the work to the limits of what is possible, in the attempt to increase the sum of what it is possible to think. Books become good when they go to this edge and risk falling over it --when they endanger the artist by reason of what he has, or has not, artistically dared.

Rushdie, Salman

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

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

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

Hubbard, Elbert

10.

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

11.

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

Millay, Edna St. Vincent

12.

Readers are plentiful: thinkers are rare.

Martineau, Harriet

13.

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.

14.

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

Byron, Lord

15.

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

Forster, Edward M.

16.

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

17.

There is a set of religious, or rather moral, writings which teach that virtue is the certain road to happiness, and vice to misery in this world. A very wholesome and comfortable doctrine, and to which we have but one objection, namely, that it is not true.

Fielding, Henry

18.

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

19.

Books are standing counselors and preachers, always at hand, and always disinterested; having this advantage over oral instructors, that they are ready to repeat their lesson as often as we please.

Chambers, Oswald

20.

Everything in this book may be wrong. [The Savior's Manual]

Bach, Richard

21.

The pleasure of reading is doubled when one lives with another who shares the same books.

Mansfield, Katherine

22.

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

Bevan, Aneurin

23.

The reason that fiction is more interesting than any other form of literature, to those who really like to study people, is that in fiction the author can really tell the truth without humiliating himself.

Roosevelt, Eleanor

24.

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

Gibbon, Edward

25.

There is creative reading as well as creative writing.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

26.

In science, read by preference the newest works. In literature, read the oldest. The classics are always modern.

Lytton, Lord Edward

27.

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

28.

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

29.

Books are not men and yet they stay alive.

Benet, Stephen Vincent

30.

If a secret history of books could be written, and the author's private thoughts and meanings noted down alongside of his story, how many insipid volumes would become interesting, and dull tales excite the reader!

Thackeray, William M.

31.

Books had instant replay long before televised sports.

Williams, Bert

32.

We are too civil to books. For a few golden sentences we will turn over and actually read a volume of four or five hundred pages.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

33.

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

Twain, Mark

34.

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

35.

Old books, you know well, are books of the world's youth, and new books are the fruits of its age.

Holmes, Oliver Wendell

36.

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.

37.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

38.

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

39.

What gunpowder did for war the printing press has done for the mind.

Phillips, Wendell

40.

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

Schopenhauer, Arthur

41.

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.

42.

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

Leacock, Stephen B.

43.

No furniture is so charming as books.

Smith, Sydney

44.

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

Barstow, Stan

45.

No entertainment is so cheap as reading, nor is any pleasure so lasting.