Motivational Quotes

Books - reading

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

- Forster, Edward M.

Best Quotes about Books - reading

What we become depends on what we read after all the professors have finished with us. The greatest university of all is the collection of books.

Carlyle, Thomas

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.

There is no such thing as a moral book or an immoral book. Books are well written or badly written. That is all.

Wilde, Oscar

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

Maclennan, Hugh

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

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

Temple, Sir William

In the case of good books, the point is not how many of them you can get through, but rather how many can get through to you.

Adler, Mortimer J.

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

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

Mccay, James T.

10.

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

Wilde, Oscar

11.

An empty book is like an infant's soul, in which anything may be written. It is capable of all things, but containeth nothing. I have a mind to fill this with profitable wonders.

Traherne, Thomas

12.

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

Lichtenberg, Georg C.

13.

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

Hubbard, Elbert

14.

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

15.

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

Barrett, E.S.

16.

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

Ruskin, John

17.

Here, my dear Lucy, hide these books. Quick, quick! Fling Peregrine Pickle under the toilette --throw Roderick Random into the closet --put The Innocent Adultery into The Whole Duty of Man; thrust Lord Aimworth under the sofa! cram Ovid behind the bolster; there --put The Man of Feeling into your pocket. Now for them.

Sheridan, Richard Brinsley

18.

Most books, like their authors, are born to die; of only a few books can it be said that death has no dominion over them; they live, and their influence lives forever.

Swartz, J.

19.

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

20.

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

Pound, Ezra

21.

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

Harington, John

22.

Once we have learned to read, meaning of words can somehow register without consciousness.

Marcel, Anthony

23.

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

Leacock, Stephen B.

24.

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

Maugham, W. Somerset

25.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

26.

There is more treasure in books than in all the pirates loot on Treasure Island and best of all, you can enjoy these riches every day of your life.

Disney, Walt

27.

A great book should leave you with many experiences and slightly exhausted at the end. You should live several lives while reading it.

Styron, William

28.

Read Homer once, and you can read no more. For all books else appear so mean, and so poor. Verse will seem prose; but still persist to read, and Homer will be all the books you need.

Buckingham, Duke of

29.

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

30.

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

31.

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

Ruskin, John

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.

The age of the book is almost gone.

Steiner, George

34.

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

Pascal, Blaise

35.

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

36.

I divide all readers into two classes: those who read to remember and those who read to forget.

Phelps, William Lyon

37.

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

Camus, Albert

38.

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

39.

Books succeed, and lives fail.

Browning, Elizabeth Barrett

40.

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

41.

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

Disraeli, Benjamin

42.

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

43.

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

44.

You've really got to start hitting the books because it's no joke out here.

Lee, Spike

45.

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

Joubert, Joseph

46.

I don't think any good book is based on factual experience. Bad books are about things the writer already knew before he wrote them.

Fuentes, Carlos

47.

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

Forster, Edward M.

48.

Read good, big important things.

Noonan, Peggy

49.

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

50.

I feel a kind of reverence for the first books of young authors. There is so much aspiration in them, so much audacious hope and trembling fear, so much of the heart's history, that all errors and shortcomings are for a while lost sight of in the amiable self assertion of youth.

Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth