Motivational Quotes

Books - reading

A book that is shut is but a block.

- Fuller, Thomas

Best Quotes about Books - reading

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

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

A big leather-bound volume makes an ideal razor strap. A thin book is useful to stick under a table with a broken caster to steady it. A large, flat atlas can be used to cover a window with a broken pane. And a thick, old-fashioned heavy book with a clasp is the finest thing in the world to throw at a noisy cat.

Twain, Mark

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 are the blessed chloroform of the mind.

Chambers, Robert

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

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

Belloc, Hilaire

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

Brodsky, Joseph

Without books the development of civilization would have been impossible. They are the engines of change, windows on the world, Lighthouses as the poet said erected in the sea of time. They are companions, teachers, magicians, bankers of the treasures of the mind, Books are humanity in print.

Schopenhauer, Arthur

10.

A house without books is like a room without windows. No man has a right to bring up his children without surrounding them with books, if he has the means to buy them. It is a wrong to his family. Children learn to read by being in the presence of books. The love of knowledge comes with reading and grows upon it. And the love of knowledge, in a young mind, is almost always a warrant against the inferior excitement of passions and vices.

Mann, Horace

11.

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

Pound, Ezra

12.

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

13.

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

Mencken, H. L.

14.

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

15.

Today a reader, tomorrow a leader.

Fusselman, W.

16.

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

Lowell, James Russell

17.

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

18.

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

Jackson, Holbrook

19.

Beware you be not swallowed up in books! An ounce of love is worth a pound of knowledge.

Wesley, John

20.

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.

21.

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

22.

I am a part of everything that I have read.

Kieran, John

23.

Books constitute capital. A library book lasts as long as a house, for hundreds of years. It is not, then, an article of mere consumption but fairly of capital, and often in the case of professional men, setting out in life, it is their only capital.

Jefferson, Thomas

24.

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.

25.

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

Whitman, Walt

26.

In science read the newest works, in literature read the oldest.

Bulwer-Lytton, Edward G.

27.

One half who graduate from college never read another book.

True, Herbert

28.

Our high respect for a well read person is praise enough for literature.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

29.

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

Howells, William Dean

30.

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

Voltaire

31.

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

Disraeli, Benjamin

32.

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

Brookner, Anita

33.

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

Montagu, Lady Mary Wortley

34.

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

35.

The unread story is not a story; it is little black marks on wood pulp. The reader, reading it, makes it live: a live thing, a story.

Guin, Ursula K. Le

36.

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

Dane, Frank

37.

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

38.

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

39.

The only books that influence us are those for which we are ready, and which have gone a little farther down our particular path than we have yet got ourselves.

Forster, Edward M.

40.

A great book should leave you with many experiences and slightly exhausted at the end. You should live several lives while reading it.

Styron, William

41.

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

Barrett, E.S.

42.

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

Carey, Joyce

43.

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

44.

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

Hadas, Moses

45.

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

Rochman, Hazel

46.

After all, the world is not a stage -- not to me: nor a theatre: nor a show-house of any sort. And art, especially novels, are not little theatres where the reader sits aloft and watches... and sighs, commiserates, condones and smiles. That's what you want a book to be: because it leaves you so safe and superior, with your two-dollar ticket to the show. And that's what my books are not and never will be. Whoever reads me will be in the thick of the scrimmage, and if he doesn't like it -- if he wants a safe seat in the audience -- let him read someone else.

Lawrence, D. H.

47.

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

48.

A wicked book cannot repent.

Proverb

49.

In any situation, ask yourself: What strengths do I possess that can contribute towards accomplishing something in this situation? Then follow through.

50.

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