Motivational Quotes

Books - reading

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

Best Quotes about Books - reading

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

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

Hubbard, Elbert

There are worse crimes than burning books. One of them is not reading them.

Brodsky, Joseph

When you have mastered numbers, you will in fact no longer be reading numbers, any more than you read words when reading books You will be reading meanings.

Geneen, Harold S.

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

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

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.

If I have not read a book before, it is, for all intents and purposes, new to me whether it was printed yesterday or three hundred years ago.

Hazlitt, William

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

10.

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

11.

Thank you for sending me a copy of your book -- I'll waste no time reading it.

Hadas, Moses

12.

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

13.

Books are not men and yet they stay alive.

Benet, Stephen Vincent

14.

Readers are plentiful: thinkers are rare.

Martineau, Harriet

15.

Surviving and thriving as a professional today demands two new approaches to the written word. First, it requires a new approach to orchestrating information, by skillfully choosing what to read and what to ignore. Second, it requires a new approach to integrating information, by reading faster and with greater comprehension.

Calano, Jimmy

16.

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

Twain, Mark

17.

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

Whitman, Walt

18.

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

19.

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

Asimov, Isaac

20.

When I am dead, I hope it may be said: His sins were scarlet, but his books were read.

Belloc, Hilaire

21.

Books are but waste paper unless we spend in action the wisdom we get from thought -- asleep. When we are weary of the living, we may repair to the dead, who have nothing of peevishness, pride, or design in their conversation.

Collier, Jeremy

22.

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

Johnson, Samuel

23.

Every abridgement of a good book is a fool abridged.

Montaigne, Michel Eyquem De

24.

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

25.

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

26.

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

Proverb, American

27.

There are very many people who read simply to prevent themselves from thinking.

Lichtenberg, Georg C.

28.

Digressions, incontestably, are the sunshine; they are the life, the soul of reading! Take them out of this book, for instance, --you might as well take the book along with them; --one cold external winter would reign in every page of it; restore them to the writer; --he steps forth like a bridegroom, --bids All-hail; brings in variety, and forbids the appetite to fail.

Sterne, Laurence

29.

Hypocrite reader -- my fellow -- my brother!

Baudelaire, Charles

30.

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

31.

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

Mencken, H. L.

32.

Books are standing counselors and preachers, always at hand, and always disinterested; having this advantage over oral instructors, that they are ready to repeat their lesson as often as we please.

Chambers, Oswald

33.

Footnotes are the finer-suckered surfaces that allow testicular paragraphs to hold fast to the wider reality of the library.

Baker, Nicholson

34.

The oldest books are still only just out to those who have not read them.

Butler, Samuel

35.

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

Carey, Joyce

36.

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

37.

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

38.

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

39.

A book worth reading is worth buying.

Ruskin, John

40.

Thy books should, like thy friends, not many be, yet such wherein men may thy judgment see.

Wycherley, William

41.

The reason a writer writes a book is to forget a book and the reason a reader reads one is to remember it.

Wolfe, Thomas

42.

Ideally a book would have no order to it, and the reader would have to discover his own.

Vaneigem, Raoul

43.

The mere brute pleasure of reading --the sort of pleasure a cow must have in grazing.

Chesterton, Gilbert K.

44.

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

Schopenhauer, Arthur

45.

A book may be compared to your neighbor: if it be good, it cannot last too long; if bad, you cannot get rid of it too early.

Brooke, Rupert

46.

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

Lichtenberg, Georg C.

47.

Books had instant replay long before televised sports.

Williams, Bert

48.

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

49.

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

Ruskin, John

50.

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

Harington, John