Motivational Quotes

Books - reading

Read, read, read. Read everything-- trash, classics, good and bad, and see how they do it. Just like a carpenter who works as an apprentice and studies the master. Read! You'll absorb it. Then write. If it is good, you'll find out. If it's not, throw it out the window.

- Faulkner, William

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

Then I though of reading -- the nice and subtle happiness of reading ... this joy not dulled by age, this polite and unpunishable vice, this selfish, serene, lifelong intoxication.

Smith, Logan Pearsall

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

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

Surviving and thriving as a professional today demands two new approaches to the written word. First, it requires a new approach to orchestrating information, by skillfully choosing what to read and what to ignore. Second, it requires a new approach to integrating information, by reading faster and with greater comprehension.

Calano, Jimmy

The books one reads in childhood, and perhaps most of all the bad and good bad books, create in one's mind a sort of false map of the world, a series of fabulous countries into which one can retreat at odd moments throughout the rest of life, and which in some cases can survive a visit to the real countries which they are supposed to represent.

Orwell, George

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

There is creative reading as well as creative writing.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

Thank you for sending me a copy of your book -- I'll waste no time reading it.

Hadas, Moses

10.

Hypocrite reader -- my fellow -- my brother!

Baudelaire, Charles

11.

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

12.

Readers are plentiful: thinkers are rare.

Martineau, Harriet

13.

A novel must be exceptionally good to live as long as the average cat.

Maclennan, Hugh

14.

There is no robber worse than a bad book.

Proverb, Italian

15.

All good books are alike in that they are truer than if they had really happened and after you are finished reading one you will feel that all that happened to you and afterwards it all belongs to you; the good and the bad, the ecstasy, the remorse, and sorrow, the people and the places and how the weather was.

Hemingway, Ernest

16.

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

Locke, John

17.

Reading a book is like re-writing it for yourself. You bring to a novel, anything you read, all your experience of the world. You bring your history and you read it in your own terms.

Carter, Angela

18.

There was a time when the world acted on books; now books act on the world.

Joubert, Joseph

19.

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

20.

I am not a speed reader. I am a speed understander.

Asimov, Isaac

21.

What is reading, but silent conversation.

Landor, Walter Savage

22.

Early in the morning, at break of day, in all the freshness and dawn of one's strength, to read a book --I call that vicious!

Nietzsche, Friedrich

23.

A man ought to read just as his inclination leads him; for what he reads as a task will do him little good.

Johnson, Samuel

24.

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

25.

The book to read is not the one which thinks for you, but the one which makes you think. No book in the world equals the Bible for that.

Mccosh

26.

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

Phillips, Wendell

27.

The best effect of any book, is that it excites the reader to self-activity.

Carlyle, Thomas

28.

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

29.

The most foolish kind of a book is a kind of leaky boat on the sea of wisdom; some of the wisdom will get in anyhow.

Holmes, Oliver Wendell

30.

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

Gibbon, Edward

31.

When you have mastered numbers, you will in fact no longer be reading numbers, any more than you read words when reading books You will be reading meanings.

Geneen, Harold S.

32.

I love to lose myself in other men's minds. When I am not walking, I am reading. I cannot sit and think; books think for me.

Lamb, Charles

33.

Thy books should, like thy friends, not many be, yet such wherein men may thy judgment see.

Wycherley, William

34.

Today a reader, tomorrow a leader.

Fusselman, W.

35.

Every abridgement of a good book is a fool abridged.

Montaigne, Michel Eyquem De

36.

No one can read with profit that which he cannot learn to read with pleasure.

Porter, Noah

37.

A book is a mirror: If an ass peers into it, you can't expect an apostle to look out.

Lichtenberg, Georg C.

38.

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

Mallarme, Stephane

39.

Faulkner, William

40.

To read well, that is, to read true books in a true spirit, is a noble exercise, and one that will task the reader more than any other exercise which the customs of the day esteem. It requires a training such as the athletes underwent, the steady intention almost of the whole life to this object.

Thoreau, Henry David

41.

A good title is the title of a successful book.

Chandler, Raymond

42.

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.

43.

A good book, in the language of the book-sellers, is a salable one; in that of the curious, a scarce one; in that of men of sense, a useful and instructive one.

Chambers, Oswald

44.

The printing press is either the greatest blessing or the greatest curse of modern times, sometimes one forgets which it is.

Barrie, Sir James M.

45.

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

46.

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

47.

When the book comes out it may hurt you -- but in order for me to do it, it had to hurt me first. I can only tell you about yourself as much as I can face about myself.

Baldwin, James

48.

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

49.

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

50.

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

Gibbon, Edward