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

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

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

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

Baker, Nicholson

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

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

Critchfield, Jim

What is the most precious, the most exciting smell awaiting you in the house when you return to it after a dozen years or so? The smell of roses, you think? No, moldering books.

Sinyavsky, Andre

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

Pound, Ezra

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

Brookner, Anita

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

10.

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

11.

A vacuum of ideas affects people differently than a vacuum of air, otherwise readers of books would be constantly collapsing.

Lichtenberg, Georg C.

12.

Some of the most famous books are the least worth reading. Their fame was due to their having done something that needed to be doing in their day. The work is done and the virtue of the book has expired.

Morely, John

13.

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

14.

Reading makes immigrants of us all. It takes us away from home, but more important, it finds homes for us everywhere.

Rochman, Hazel

15.

A good book is the best of friends, the same today and for ever.

Tupper, Martin

16.

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

17.

Tradition is but a meteor, which, if it once falls, cannot be rekindled. Memory, once interrupted, is not to be recalled. But written learning is a fixed luminary, which, after the cloud that had hidden it has passed away, is again bright in its proper station. So books are faithful repositories, which may be awhile neglected or forgotten, but when opened again, will again impart instruction.

Johnson

18.

The books that everybody admires are those that nobody reads.

France, Anatole

19.

To read too many books is harmful.

Zedong, Mao

20.

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

Shaw, George Bernard

21.

A book might be written on the injustice of the just.

Hope, Anthony

22.

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.

23.

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

Brown, Les

24.

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

25.

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

Hadas, Moses

26.

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

Barrett, E.S.

27.

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

28.

Next, in importance to books are their titles.

Davies, Paul

29.

Every man is a volume if you know how to read him.

Channing, William Ellery

30.

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

31.

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

Milton, John

32.

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

Wycherley, William

33.

Today a reader, tomorrow a leader.

Fusselman, W.

34.

Next to acquiring good friends, the best acquisition is that of good books.

Colton, Charles Caleb

35.

Read good, big important things.

Noonan, Peggy

36.

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

37.

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

38.

The multitude of books is a great evil. There is no limit to this fever for writing.

Luther, Martin

39.

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.

40.

The books that the world calls immoral are the books that show the world its own shame.

Wilde, Oscar

41.

I read the newspaper avidly. It is my one form of continuous fiction.

Bevan, Aneurin

42.

The best effect of any book, is that it excites the reader to self-activity.

Carlyle, Thomas

43.

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

Lytton, Lord Edward

44.

Don't ask me who's influenced me. A lion is made up of the lambs he's digested, and I've been reading all my life.

Seferis, Giorgos

45.

The reason that fiction is more interesting than any other form of literature, to those who really like to study people, is that in fiction the author can really tell the truth without humiliating himself.

Roosevelt, Eleanor

46.

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

47.

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

48.

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

49.

A person of mature years and ripe development, who is expecting nothing from literature but the corroboration and renewal of past ideas, may find satisfaction in a lucidity so complete as to occasion no imaginative excitement, but young and ambitious students are not content with it. They seek the excitement because they are capable of the growth that it accompanies.

Cooley, Charles Horton

50.

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

Millay, Edna St. Vincent