Motivational Quotes

Books - reading

It does not follow because many books are written by persons born in America that there exists an American literature. Books which imitate or represent the thoughts and life of Europe do not constitute an American literature. Before such can exist, an original idea must animate this nation and fresh currents of life must call into life fresh thoughts along the shore.

- Fuller, Margaret

Best Quotes about Books - reading

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

My early and invincible love of reading I would not exchange for all the riches of India.

Gibbon, Edward

Early in the morning, at break of day, in all the freshness and dawn of one's strength, to read a book --I call that vicious!

Nietzsche, Friedrich

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

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

Vaneigem, Raoul

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

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

After all manner of professors have done their best for us, the place we are to get knowledge is in books. The true university of these days is a collection of books.

Carlyle, Thomas

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

Whitman, Walt

10.

There was a time when the world acted on books; now books act on the world.

Joubert, Joseph

11.

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

Leacock, Stephen B.

12.

Everywhere I have sought rest and not found it, except sitting in a corner by myself with a little book.

Kempis, Thomas

13.

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

14.

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

Belloc, Hilaire

15.

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

Baker, Nicholson

16.

Books succeed, and lives fail.

Browning, Elizabeth Barrett

17.

The failure to read good books both enfeebles the vision and strengthens our most fatal tendency --the belief that the here and now is all there is.

Bloom, Allan

18.

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

Asimov, Isaac

19.

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

20.

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

Mencken, H. L.

21.

A wicked book cannot repent.

Proverb

22.

The age of the book is almost gone.

Steiner, George

23.

Nine-tenths of the existing books are nonsense and the clever books are the refutation of that nonsense.

Disraeli, Benjamin

24.

Read, read, read. Read everything-- trash, classics, good and bad, and see how they do it. Just like a carpenter who works as an apprentice and studies the master. Read! You'll absorb it. Then write. If it is good, you'll find out. If it's not, throw it out the window.

Faulkner, William

25.

Fiction reveals truth that reality obscures.

West, Jessamyn

26.

Reading is equivalent to thinking with someone else's head instead of with one's own.

Schopenhauer, Arthur

27.

When a book raises your spirit, and inspires you with noble and manly thoughts, seek for no other test of its excellence. It is good, and made by a good workman.

Bruyere, Jean De La

28.

The books that everybody admires are those that nobody reads.

France, Anatole

29.

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

Rohn, Jim

30.

Reading is to the mind what exercise is to the body. It is wholesome and bracing for the mind to have its faculties kept on the stretch.

Steele, Sir Richard

31.

There is no such thing as a moral book or an immoral book. Books are well written or badly written. That is all.

Wilde, Oscar

32.

This book is not to be tossed lightly aside, but to be hurled with great force.

Parker, Dorothy

33.

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

Barrett, E.S.

34.

The reading or non-reading a book will never keep down a single petticoat.

Byron, Lord

35.

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

Howells, William Dean

36.

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

Millay, Edna St. Vincent

37.

Read good, big important things.

Noonan, Peggy

38.

Book love... is your pass to the greatest, the purest, and the most perfect pleasure that God has prepared for His creatures.

Trollope, Anthony

39.

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

40.

The constant habit of perusing devout books is so indispensable, that it has been termed the oil of the lamp of prayer. Too much reading, however, and too little meditation, may produce the effect of a lamp inverted; which is extinguished by the very excess of that ailment, whose property is to feed it.

More, Hannah

41.

When we read a story, we inhabit it. The covers of the book are like a roof and four walls. What is to happen next will take place within the four walls of the story. And this is possible because the story's voice makes everything its own.

Berger, John

42.

A dose of poison can do its work but once. A bad book can go on poisoning minds for generations.

Murray, William

43.

To sit alone in the lamplight with a book spread out before you hold intimate converse with men of unseen generations -- such is pleasure beyond compare.

Kenko, Yoshida

44.

Books had instant replay long before televised sports.

Williams, Bert

45.

No furniture is so charming as books.

Smith, Sydney

46.

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

47.

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

48.

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

Twain, Mark

49.

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

50.

The greatest gift is the passion for reading. It is cheap, it consoles, it distracts, it excites, it gives you knowledge of the world and experience of a wide kind. It is a moral illumination.

Hardwick, Elizabeth