Motivational Quotes

Books - reading

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.

Best Quotes about Books - reading

Books to judicious compilers, are useful; to particular arts and professions, they are absolutely necessary; to men of real science, they are tools: but more are tools to them.

Johnson

A good book, in the language of the book-sellers, is a salable one; in that of the curious, a scarce one; in that of men of sense, a useful and instructive one.

Chambers, Oswald

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

Hugo, Victor

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

Fuller, Margaret

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

Gibbon, Edward

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

Disraeli, Benjamin

A wicked book cannot repent.

Proverb

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

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

Butler, Samuel

10.

All good books are alike in that they are truer than if they had really happened and after you are finished reading one you will feel that all that happened to you and afterwards it all belongs to you; the good and the bad, the ecstasy, the remorse, and sorrow, the people and the places and how the weather was.

Hemingway, Ernest

11.

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

Maclennan, Hugh

12.

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

13.

Until I feared I would lose it, I never loved to read. One does not love breathing.

Lee, Harper

14.

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

15.

The books one reads in childhood, and perhaps most of all the bad and good bad books, create in one's mind a sort of false map of the world, a series of fabulous countries into which one can retreat at odd moments throughout the rest of life, and which in some cases can survive a visit to the real countries which they are supposed to represent.

Orwell, George

16.

I always begin at the left with the opening word of the sentence and read toward the right and I recommend this method.

Thurber, James

17.

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

18.

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

19.

Reading is a basic tool in the living of a good life.

Adler, Mortimer J.

20.

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

21.

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

Colton, Charles Caleb

22.

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

23.

One always tends to overpraise a long book, because one has got through it.

Forster, Edward M.

24.

Here, my dear Lucy, hide these books. Quick, quick! Fling Peregrine Pickle under the toilette --throw Roderick Random into the closet --put The Innocent Adultery into The Whole Duty of Man; thrust Lord Aimworth under the sofa! cram Ovid behind the bolster; there --put The Man of Feeling into your pocket. Now for them.

Sheridan, Richard Brinsley

25.

A good title is the title of a successful book.

Chandler, Raymond

26.

It is from books that wise people derive consolation in the troubles of life.

Hugo, Victor

27.

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.

28.

You should read books like you take medicine, by advice, and not by advertisement.

Ruskin, John

29.

No one can read with profit that which he cannot learn to read with pleasure.

Porter, Noah

30.

Five daily newspapers arrive in my California driveway. The New York times and the Wall Street Journal are supplemented by three local papers. As for magazines, I read, or at least skim, Business Week, Forbes, The Economist, INC; Industry Week, Fortune. Other subscriptions include Sales and Marketing Management, Modern Health Care, Progressive Grocer, High Tech Business, and Slaon Management Review from MIT. I religiously read Business Tokyo, Asia Week, and Far Eastern Economic Review. I glance at Newsweek and Time ... but I devour the New Republic, Policy Review, Foreign Affairs, The Washington Monthly, and Public Interest. How about books? A dozen or more each month.

Peters, Thomas J.

31.

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

Shaw, George Bernard

32.

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

Belloc, Hilaire

33.

Those who do not read are no better off than those who cannot read.

34.

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

35.

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

36.

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

Pound, Ezra

37.

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.

38.

A novel is a mirror carried along a main road.

Stendhal, Henri B.

39.

A novel is never anything, but a philosophy put into images.

Camus, Albert

40.

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

41.

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

Barrett, E.S.

42.

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''

43.

A book that is shut is but a block.

Fuller, Thomas

44.

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

Harington, John

45.

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

46.

Does there, I wonder, exist a being who has read all, or approximately all, that the person of average culture is supposed to have read, and that not to have read is a social sin? If such a being does exist, surely he is an old, a very old man.

Bennett, Arnold

47.

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

Lichtenberg, Georg C.

48.

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

Bach, Richard

49.

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

Bevan, Aneurin

50.

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