Motivational Quotes

Books - reading

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

- Frost, Robert

Best Quotes about Books - reading

When I get a little money, I buy books; and if any is left I buy food and clothes.

Erasmus, Desiderius

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

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

A book worth reading is worth buying.

Ruskin, John

Many books require no thought from those who read them, and for a very simple reason: they made no such demand upon those who wrote them. Those works, therefore, are the most valuable, that set our thinking faculties in the fullest operation. understand them.

Clarendon

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

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.

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

Johnson, Samuel

A real book is not one that we read, but one that reads us.

Auden, W. H.

10.

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

Ruskin, John

11.

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

Schopenhauer, Arthur

12.

The great American novel has not only already been written, it has already been rejected.

Dane, Frank

13.

The books that everybody admires are those that nobody reads.

France, Anatole

14.

Until it is kindled by a spirit as flamingly alive as the one which gave it birth a book is dead to us. Words divested of their magic are but dead hieroglyphs.

Miller, Henry

15.

We should be as careful of the books we read, as of the company we keep. The dead very often have more power than the living.

Edwards, Tryon

16.

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

17.

Books are the best of things if well used; if abused, among the worst. They are good for nothing but to inspire. I had better never see a book than be warped by its attraction clean out of my own orbit, and made a satellite instead of a system.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

18.

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

Carey, Joyce

19.

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

20.

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

Frost, Robert

21.

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

22.

Except a living man there is nothing more wonderful than a book! a message to us from the dead -- from human souls we never saw, who lived, perhaps, thousands of miles away. And yet these, in those little sheets of paper, speak to us, arouse us, terrify us, teach us, comfort us, open their hearts to us as brothers.

Kingsley, Charles

23.

One half who graduate from college never read another book.

True, Herbert

24.

The world may be full of fourth-rate writers but it's also full of fourth-rate readers.

Barstow, Stan

25.

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

26.

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

27.

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

Asimov, Isaac

28.

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

29.

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

Adler, Mortimer J.

30.

Books and marriage go ill together.

Moliere

31.

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

Pound, Ezra

32.

You are wise, witty and wonderful, but you spend too much time reading this sort of stuff.

Critchfield, Jim

33.

All the known world, excepting only savage nations, is governed by books.

Voltaire

34.

A person who publishes a book appears willfully in public with his pants down.

Millay, Edna St. Vincent

35.

I can't bear art that you can walk round and admire. A book should be either a bandit or a rebel or a man in the crowd.

Lawrence, D. H.

36.

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

Mallarme, Stephane

37.

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

38.

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

39.

The man who does not read books has no advantage over the man that can not read them.

Twain, Mark

40.

Next, in importance to books are their titles.

Davies, Paul

41.

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

42.

Readers are less and less seen as mere non-writers, the subhuman other or flawed derivative of the author; the lack of a pen is no longer a shameful mark of secondary status but a positively enabling space, just as within every writer can be seen to lurk, as a repressed but contaminating antithesis, a reader.

Eagleton, Terry

43.

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.

44.

To learn to read is to light a fire; every syllable that is spelled out is a spark.

Hugo, Victor

45.

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

46.

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

47.

To read too many books is harmful.

Zedong, Mao

48.

All the best stories in the world are but one story in reality -- the story of escape. It is the only thing which interests us all and at all times, how to escape.

Benson, Arthur Christopher

49.

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

Montagu, Lady Mary Wortley

50.

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