Motivational Quotes

Books - reading

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

- Erasmus, Desiderius

Best Quotes about Books - reading

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

Beware of the person of one book.

Aquinas, St. Thomas

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

Pascal, Blaise

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

Lowell, James Russell

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

Harington, John

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

Hood, Thomas

I am what libraries and librarians have made me, with little assistance from a professor of Greek and poets.

Sandwell, B. K.

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

God be thanked for books; they are the voices of the distant and the dead, and make us heirs of the spiritual life of past ages.

Channing, William Ellery

10.

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

Voltaire

11.

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

Murray, William

12.

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

Phillips, Wendell

13.

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

Twain, Mark

14.

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

15.

The great American novel has not only already been written, it has already been rejected.

Dane, Frank

16.

Of all the ways of acquiring books, writing them oneself is regarded as the most praiseworthy method. Writers are really people who write books not because they are poor, but because they are dissatisfied with the books which they could buy but do not like.

Benjamin, Walter

17.

I would sooner read a timetable or a catalog than nothing at all.

Maugham, W. Somerset

18.

Books had instant replay long before televised sports.

Williams, Bert

19.

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

Forster, Edward M.

20.

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

Blackie, Professor

21.

Prerequisite for rereadability in books: that they be forgettable.

Rostand, Jean

22.

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

Gibbon, Edward

23.

The failure to read good books both enfeebles the vision and strengthens our most fatal tendency --the belief that the here and now is all there is.

Bloom, Allan

24.

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

25.

The Brahmins say that in their books there are many predictions of times in which it will rain. But press those books as strongly as you can, you can not get out of them a drop of water. So you can not get out of all the books that contain the best precepts the smallest good deed.

Tolstoy, Count Leo

26.

A good title is the title of a successful book.

Chandler, Raymond

27.

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

Erasmus, Desiderius

28.

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

29.

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

Hubbard, Elbert

30.

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

31.

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

32.

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

Schopenhauer, Arthur

33.

A novel is a mirror carried along a main road.

Stendhal, Henri B.

34.

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.

35.

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

36.

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

Rochman, Hazel

37.

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

38.

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

39.

The book salesman should be honored because he brings to our attention, as a rule, the very books we need most and neglect most.

Crane, Frank

40.

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

Lytton, Lord Edward

41.

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

42.

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

43.

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

44.

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

Coolio

45.

Read good, big important things.

Noonan, Peggy

46.

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

Leacock, Stephen B.

47.

The books that the world calls immoral are the books that show the world its own shame.

Wilde, Oscar

48.

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

49.

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

50.

A conventional good read is usually a bad read, a relaxing bath in what we know already. A true good read is surely an act of innovative creation in which we, the readers, become conspirators.

Bradbury, Malcolm