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

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

Temple, Sir William

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

Barrett, E.S.

Beware of the person of one book.

Aquinas, St. Thomas

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

Murray, William

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

The flood of print has turned reading into a process of gulping rather than savoring

Chappell, Warren

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

Hubbard, Elbert

There is creative reading as well as creative writing.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

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

Lee, Harper

10.

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

Brookner, Anita

11.

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

12.

The chief knowledge that a man gets from reading books is the knowledge that very few of them are worth reading.

Mencken, H. L.

13.

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

14.

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

Phelps, William Lyon

15.

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

Carey, Joyce

16.

No furniture is so charming as books.

Smith, Sydney

17.

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

Locke, John

18.

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

Phillips, Wendell

19.

It does not follow because many books are written by persons born in America that there exists an American literature. Books which imitate or represent the thoughts and life of Europe do not constitute an American literature. Before such can exist, an original idea must animate this nation and fresh currents of life must call into life fresh thoughts along the shore.

Fuller, Margaret

20.

Reading is to the mind what exercise is to the body. It is wholesome and bracing for the mind to have its faculties kept on the stretch.

Steele, Sir Richard

21.

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

22.

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

23.

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

24.

All my good reading, you might say, was done in the toilet. There are passages in Ulysses which can be read only in the toilet -- if one wants to extract the full flavor of their content.

Miller, Henry

25.

A house is not a home unless it contains food and fire for the mind as well as the body.

Fuller, Margaret

26.

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

Lowell, James Russell

27.

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

28.

Begin to read a book that will help you move toward your dream.

Brown, Les

29.

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

30.

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

31.

A book that is shut is but a block.

Fuller, Thomas

32.

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

33.

There are people who read too much: bibliobibuli. I know some who are constantly drunk on books, as other men are drunk on whiskey or religion. They wander through this most diverting and stimulating of worlds in a haze, seeing nothing and hearing nothing.

Mencken, H. L.

34.

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

Montagu, Lady Mary Wortley

35.

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

Ruskin, John

36.

The books we think we ought to read are poky, dull, and dry; The books that we would like to read we are ashamed to buy; The books that people talk about we never can recall; And the books that people give us, oh, they're the worst of all.

Wells, Carolyn

37.

As writers become more numerous, it is natural for readers to become more indolent; whence must necessarily arise a desire of attaining knowledge with the greatest possible ease.

Goldsmith, Oliver

38.

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.

39.

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

40.

Books, books, books had found the secret of a garret-room piled high with cases in my father's name; Piled high, packed large, --where, creeping in and out among the giant fossils of my past, like some small nimble mouse between the ribs of a mastodon, I nibbled here and there at this or that box, pulling through the gap, in heats of terror, haste, victorious joy, the first book first. And how I felt it beat under my pillow, in the morning's dark. An hour before the sun would let me read! My books!

Browning, Elizabeth Barrett

41.

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

42.

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

Mccay, James T.

43.

No matter how busy you may think you are, you must find time for reading, or surrender yourself to self-chosen ignorance.

Townsend, Atwood H.

44.

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

45.

Books that you carry to the fire, and hold readily in your hand, are most useful after all.

Johnson, Samuel

46.

What is a diary as a rule? A document useful to the person who keeps it. Dull to the contemporary who reads it and invaluable to the student, centuries afterwards, who treasures it.

Terry, Helen

47.

No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader.

Frost, Robert

48.

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

49.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

50.

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