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

Mansfield, Katherine

To use books rightly, is to go to them for help; to appeal to them when our own knowledge and power fail; to be led by them into wider sight and purer conception than our own, and to receive from them the united sentence of the judges and councils of all time, against our solitary and unstable opinions.

Ruskin, John

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

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

Hope, Anthony

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

Montagu, Lady Mary Wortley

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

Byron, Lord

The book you don't read won't help.

Rohn, Jim

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.

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

10.

The good of a book lies in its being read. A book is made up of signs that speak of other signs, which in their turn speak of things. Without an eye to read them, a book contains signs that produce no concepts; therefore it is dumb.

Eco, Umberto

11.

A real book is not one that we read, but one that reads us.

Auden, W. H.

12.

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

Forster, Edward M.

13.

The lessons taught in great books are misleading. The commerce in life is rarely so simple and never so just.

Brookner, Anita

14.

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

15.

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

16.

Everything you need for better future and success has already been written. And guess what? All you have to do is go to the library.

Rohn, Jim

17.

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

Harington, John

18.

After all manner of professors have done their best for us, the place we are to get knowledge is in books. The true university of these days is a collection of books.

Carlyle, Thomas

19.

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

Disraeli, Benjamin

20.

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

21.

Today a reader, tomorrow a leader.

Fusselman, W.

22.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

23.

Books are men of higher stature; the only men that speak aloud for future times to hear.

Barrett, E.S.

24.

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

25.

The words of my book nothing, the drift of it everything.

Whitman, Walt

26.

There are two kinds of books. Those that no one reads and those that no one ought to read.

Mencken, H. L.

27.

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

Barstow, Stan

28.

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''

29.

Prerequisite for rereadability in books: that they be forgettable.

Rostand, Jean

30.

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

Hood, Thomas

31.

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

Gibbon, Edward

32.

The worst readers are those who behave like plundering troops: they take away a few things they can use, dirty and confound the remainder, and revile the whole.

Nietzsche, Friedrich

33.

Book love... is your pass to the greatest, the purest, and the most perfect pleasure that God has prepared for His creatures.

Trollope, Anthony

34.

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

35.

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

Schopenhauer, Arthur

36.

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

37.

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

38.

A book that is shut is but a block.

Fuller, Thomas

39.

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

40.

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

Carey, Joyce

41.

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

42.

Books are masters who instruct us without rods or ferules, without words or anger, without bread or money. If you approach them, they are not asleep; if you seek them, they do not hide; if you blunder, they do not scold; if you are ignorant, they do not laugh at you.

Bury, Richard De

43.

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

44.

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

Lee, Harper

45.

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

46.

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

Mcluhan, Marshall

47.

I always like to look on the optimistic side of life, but I am realistic enough to know that life is a complex matter.

Disney, Walt

48.

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

Mallarme, Stephane

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.

Everywhere I have sought rest and not found it, except sitting in a corner by myself with a little book.

Kempis, Thomas