Motivational Quotes

Books - reading

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.

Best Quotes about Books - reading

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

The unread story is not a story; it is little black marks on wood pulp. The reader, reading it, makes it live: a live thing, a story.

Guin, Ursula K. Le

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

Joubert, Joseph

After all, the world is not a stage -- not to me: nor a theatre: nor a show-house of any sort. And art, especially novels, are not little theatres where the reader sits aloft and watches... and sighs, commiserates, condones and smiles. That's what you want a book to be: because it leaves you so safe and superior, with your two-dollar ticket to the show. And that's what my books are not and never will be. Whoever reads me will be in the thick of the scrimmage, and if he doesn't like it -- if he wants a safe seat in the audience -- let him read someone else.

Lawrence, D. H.

In any situation, ask yourself: What strengths do I possess that can contribute towards accomplishing something in this situation? Then follow through.

Books, like friends, should be few and well chosen. Like friends, too, we should return to them again and again for, like true friends, they will never fail us -- never cease to instruct -- never cloy.

Colton, Charles Caleb

Those who do not read are no better off than those who cannot read.

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

Pascal, Blaise

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

Locke, John

10.

Who ever converses among old books will be hard to please among the new.

Temple, Sir William

11.

Today a reader, tomorrow a leader.

Fusselman, W.

12.

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

Mccay, James T.

13.

Books succeed, and lives fail.

Browning, Elizabeth Barrett

14.

To buy books would be a good thing if we also could buy the time to read them.

Schopenhauer, Arthur

15.

The constant habit of perusing devout books is so indispensable, that it has been termed the oil of the lamp of prayer. Too much reading, however, and too little meditation, may produce the effect of a lamp inverted; which is extinguished by the very excess of that ailment, whose property is to feed it.

More, Hannah

16.

A wicked book cannot repent.

Proverb

17.

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

Adler, Mortimer J.

18.

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

Brookner, Anita

19.

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

20.

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

21.

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

Camus, Albert

22.

How many a man has dated a new era in his life from the reading of a book! The book exists for us, perchance, that will explain our miracles and reveal new ones. The at present unutterable things we may find somewhere uttered.

Thoreau, Henry David

23.

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

Rohn, Jim

24.

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

Rohn, Jim

25.

Books are the blessed chloroform of the mind.

Chambers, Robert

26.

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.

27.

A library is thought in cold storage.

Samuel, Herbert

28.

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

29.

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

Lowell, James Russell

30.

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

31.

Books to judicious compilers, are useful; to particular arts and professions, they are absolutely necessary; to men of real science, they are tools: but more are tools to them.

Johnson

32.

Happy is he who has laid up in his youth, and held fast in all fortune, a genuine and passionate love for reading.

Choate, Rufus

33.

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.

34.

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''

35.

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

36.

The world of books is the most remarkable creation of man nothing else that he builds ever lasts monuments fall; nations perish; civilization grow old and die out; new races build others. But in the world of books are volumes that have seen this happen again and again and yet live on. Still young, still as fresh as the day they were written, still telling men's hearts, of the hearts of men centuries dead.

Day, Clarence

37.

Some of the most famous books are the least worth reading. Their fame was due to their having done something that needed to be doing in their day. The work is done and the virtue of the book has expired.

Morely, John

38.

Don't just read the easy stuff. You may be entertained by it, but you will never grow from it.

Rohn, Jim

39.

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

Murray, William

40.

A good title is the title of a successful book.

Chandler, Raymond

41.

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

42.

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

43.

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

44.

A novel is a mirror carried along a main road.

Stendhal, Henri B.

45.

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

Bevan, Aneurin

46.

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

Kempis, Thomas

47.

No man understands a deep book until he has seen and lived at least part of its contents.

Pound, Ezra

48.

A bibliophile of little means is likely to suffer often. Books don't slip from his hands but fly past him through the air, high as birds, high as prices.

Neruda, Pablo

49.

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

Proverb, American

50.

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