Motivational Quotes

Books - reading

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

- Fuller, Margaret

Best Quotes about Books - reading

She could give herself up to the written word as naturally as a good dancer to music or a fine swimmer to water. The only difficulty was that after finishing the last sentence she was left with a feeling at once hollow and uncomfortably full. Exactly like indigestion.

Rhys, Jean

Then I though of reading -- the nice and subtle happiness of reading ... this joy not dulled by age, this polite and unpunishable vice, this selfish, serene, lifelong intoxication.

Smith, Logan Pearsall

Most books today seemed to have been written overnight from books read the day before.

Chamfort, Sebastien-Roch Nicolas De

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

Howells, William Dean

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

Bach, Richard

I feel like I'm drowning. Every night, I'm carrying home loads of things to read but I'm too exhausted. I keep clipping things and Xeroxing them and planning to read them eventually, but I just end up throwing it all away and feeling guilty.

Levine, Ghita

You will be the same person in five as you are today except for the people you meet and the books you read.

Jones, Charles ''Tremendous''

One half who graduate from college never read another book.

True, Herbert

If I had my way books would not be written in English, but in an exceedingly difficult secret language that only skilled professional readers and story-tellers could interpret. Then people like you would have to go to public halls and pay good prices to hear the professionals decode and read the books aloud for you. This plan would have the advantage of scaring off all amateur authors, retired politicians, country doctors and I-Married-a-Midget writers who would not have the patience to learn the secret language.

Davies, Robertson

10.

Old books that have ceased to be of service should no more be abandoned than should old friends who have ceased to give pleasure.

Worsthorne, Sir Peregrine

11.

The pleasure of reading is doubled when one lives with another who shares the same books.

Mansfield, Katherine

12.

Much reading is an oppression of the mind, and extinguishes the natural candle, which is the reason of so many senseless scholars in the world.

Penn, William

13.

Don't just read the easy stuff. You may be entertained by it, but you will never grow from it.

Rohn, Jim

14.

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

Hadas, Moses

15.

What is reading, but silent conversation.

Landor, Walter Savage

16.

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

Lowell, James Russell

17.

I am what libraries and librarians have made me, with little assistance from a professor of Greek and poets.

Sandwell, B. K.

18.

There are books so alive that you're always afraid that while you weren't reading, the book has gone and changed, has shifted like a river; while you went on living, it went on living too, and like a river moved on and moved away. No one has stepped twice into the same river. But did anyone ever step twice into the same book?

Tsvetaeva, Marina

19.

With one day's reading a man may have the key in his hands.

Pound, Ezra

20.

Prerequisite for rereadability in books: that they be forgettable.

Rostand, Jean

21.

Books are the blessed chloroform of the mind.

Chambers, Robert

22.

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

Lichtenberg, Georg C.

23.

If a secret history of books could be written, and the author's private thoughts and meanings noted down alongside of his story, how many insipid volumes would become interesting, and dull tales excite the reader!

Thackeray, William M.

24.

In science, read by preference the newest works. In literature, read the oldest. The classics are always modern.

Lytton, Lord Edward

25.

He that loves a book will never want a faithful friend, a wholesome counselor, a cheerful companion, an effectual comforter. By study, by reading, by thinking, one may innocently divert and pleasantly entertain himself, as in all weathers, as in all fortunes.

Barrow

26.

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

27.

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

28.

My books are water; those of the great geniuses are wine -- everybody drinks water.

Twain, Mark

29.

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

Frost, Robert

30.

There is no robber worse than a bad book.

Proverb, Italian

31.

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

32.

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

33.

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

Brookner, Anita

34.

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

Baker, Nicholson

35.

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

36.

There is a set of religious, or rather moral, writings which teach that virtue is the certain road to happiness, and vice to misery in this world. A very wholesome and comfortable doctrine, and to which we have but one objection, namely, that it is not true.

Fielding, Henry

37.

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

38.

If a book comes from the heart it will contrive to reach other hearts. All art and author craft are of small account to that.

Carlyle, Thomas

39.

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

Auden, W. H.

40.

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

41.

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

Maclennan, Hugh

42.

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

Hugo, Victor

43.

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

Barrett, E.S.

44.

How can you dare teach a man to read until you've taught him everything else first?

Shaw, George Bernard

45.

Read as you taste fruit or savor wine, or enjoy friendship, love or life.

Jackson, Holbrook

46.

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

Temple, Sir William

47.

Some books leave us free and some books make us free.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

48.

Next, in importance to books are their titles.

Davies, Paul

49.

There are two kinds of books. Those that no one reads and those that no one ought to read.

Mencken, H. L.

50.

We ought to reverence books; to look on them as useful and mighty things. If they are good and true, whether they are about religion, politics, farming, trade, law, or medicine, they are the message of Christ, the maker of all things -- the teacher of all truth.

Kingsley, Charles