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

People are much more willing to lend you books than bookcases.

Twain, Mark

The books we read should be chosen with great care, that they may be, as an Egyptian king wrote over his library, The medicines of the soul.

Hood, Paxton

The reading of all good books is like a conversation with all the finest men of past centuries.

Descartes, Rene

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

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

Temple, Sir William

Books succeed, and lives fail.

Browning, Elizabeth Barrett

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

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

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

10.

The tools I need for my work are paper, tobacco, food, and a little whiskey.

Faulkner, William

11.

There is no robber worse than a bad book.

Proverb, Italian

12.

From the moment I picked your book up until I laid it down I was convulsed with laughter. Some day I intend reading it.

Marx, Groucho

13.

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

Whitman, Walt

14.

The mortality of all inanimate things is terrible to me, but that of books most of all.

Howells, William Dean

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 in this book may be wrong. [The Savior's Manual]

Bach, Richard

17.

Do we write books so that they shall merely be read? Don't we also write them for employment in the household? For one that is read from start to finish, thousands are leafed through, other thousands lie motionless, others are jammed against mouseholes, thrown at rats, others are stood on, sat on, drummed on, have gingerbread baked on them or are used to light pipes.

Lichtenberg, Georg C.

18.

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

19.

The Brahmins say that in their books there are many predictions of times in which it will rain. But press those books as strongly as you can, you can not get out of them a drop of water. So you can not get out of all the books that contain the best precepts the smallest good deed.

Tolstoy, Count Leo

20.

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

21.

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

22.

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.

23.

The books one has written in the past have two surprises in store: one couldn't write them again, and wouldn't want to.

Rostand, Jean

24.

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

Ruskin, John

25.

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

Leacock, Stephen B.

26.

In the dark colony of night, when I consider man's magnificent capacity for malice, madness, folly, envy, rage, and destructiveness, and I wonder whether we shall not end up as breakfast for newts and polyps, I seem to hear the muffled cries of all the words in all the books with covers closed.

Rosten, Leo

27.

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

Proverb, American

28.

A book that is shut is but a block.

Fuller, Thomas

29.

I heard his library burned down and both books were destroyed -- and one of them hadn't even been colored in yet.

Dawkins, John

30.

Prerequisite for rereadability in books: that they be forgettable.

Rostand, Jean

31.

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

Marcel, Anthony

32.

A novel is a mirror carried along a main road.

Stendhal, Henri B.

33.

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

34.

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.

35.

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

36.

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

Maclennan, Hugh

37.

Books are not absolutely dead things, but do contain a certain potency of life in them, to be as active as the soul whose progeny they are; they preserve, as in a vial, the purest efficacy and extraction of the living intellect that bred them.

Milton, John

38.

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

Rohn, Jim

39.

I wish I could write a beautiful book to break those hearts that are soon to cease to exist: a book of faith and small neat worlds and of people who live by the philosophies of popular songs.

40.

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

Pascal, Blaise

41.

Who kills a man kills a reasonable creature, God's image, but thee who destroys a good book, kills reason itself.

Milton, John

42.

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

Porter, Noah

43.

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

44.

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

Pound, Ezra

45.

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

46.

Hypocrite reader -- my fellow -- my brother!

Baudelaire, Charles

47.

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

48.

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

Phillips, Wendell

49.

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

Asimov, Isaac

50.

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

Carey, Joyce