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

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

Channing, William Ellery

The last thing one discovers in composing a work is what to put first.

Pascal, Blaise

Beware of the person of one book.

Aquinas, St. Thomas

A book might be written on the injustice of the just.

Hope, Anthony

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

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

Barstow, Stan

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

Montagu, Lady Mary Wortley

When I am dead, I hope it may be said: His sins were scarlet, but his books were read.

Belloc, Hilaire

I am a part of everything that I have read.

Kieran, John

10.

The reading of all good books is like a conversation with all the finest men of past centuries.

Descartes, Rene

11.

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

Ruskin, John

12.

I heard his library burned down and both books were destroyed -- and one of them hadn't even been colored in yet.

Dawkins, John

13.

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

14.

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

Millay, Edna St. Vincent

15.

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

16.

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

Lytton, Lord Edward

17.

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

18.

The good parts of a book may be only something a writer is lucky enough to overhear or it may be the wreck of his whole damn life --and one is as good as the other.

Hemingway, Ernest

19.

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

20.

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

Disraeli, Benjamin

21.

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

Adler, Mortimer J.

22.

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

Mansfield, Katherine

23.

Miss a meal if you have to, but don't miss a book.

Rohn, Jim

24.

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

25.

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

Brodsky, Joseph

26.

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

27.

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

Mccay, James T.

28.

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

29.

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

30.

Books are lighthouses erected in the great sea of time.

Whipple, Edwin P.

31.

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

Tupper, Martin

32.

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

Twain, Mark

33.

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

Lee, Harper

34.

With one day's reading a man may have the key in his hands.

Pound, Ezra

35.

Books in a large university library system: 2, 000,000. Books in an average large city library: 1 0,000. Average number of books in a chain bookstore: 30, 000. Books in an average neighborhood branch library: 20, 000.

Horowitz, Lois

36.

Everything in the world exists to end up in a book.

Mallarme, Stephane

37.

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

38.

A dose of poison can do its work but once. A bad book can go on poisoning minds for generations.

Murray, William

39.

The Bible remained for me a book of books, still divine -- but divine in the sense that all great books are divine which teach men how to live righteously.

Keith, Sir Arthur

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.

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

Jackson, Holbrook

42.

A novel is never anything, but a philosophy put into images.

Camus, Albert

43.

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

Brown, Les

44.

A good book is the very essence of a good man. His virtues survive in it, while the foibles and faults of his actual life are forgotten. All the goodly company of the excellent and great sit around my table, or look down on me from yonder shelves, waiting patiently to answer my questions and enrich me with their wisdom. A precious book is a foretaste of immortality.

Cuyler, Theodore L.

45.

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

46.

The chief knowledge that a man gets from reading books is the knowledge that very few of them are worth reading.

Mencken, H. L.

47.

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

48.

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''

49.

You should read books like you take medicine, by advice, and not by advertisement.

Ruskin, John

50.

A person of mature years and ripe development, who is expecting nothing from literature but the corroboration and renewal of past ideas, may find satisfaction in a lucidity so complete as to occasion no imaginative excitement, but young and ambitious students are not content with it. They seek the excitement because they are capable of the growth that it accompanies.

Cooley, Charles Horton