Motivational Quotes

Books - reading

Books are those faithful mirrors that reflect to our mind the minds of sages and heroes.

- Gibbon, Edward

Best Quotes about Books - reading

Hypocrite reader -- my fellow -- my brother!

Baudelaire, Charles

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

Schopenhauer, Arthur

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

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

Lowell, James Russell

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

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

Murray, William

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

Milton, John

In the dark colony of night, when I consider man's magnificent capacity for malice, madness, folly, envy, rage, and destructiveness, and I wonder whether we shall not end up as breakfast for newts and polyps, I seem to hear the muffled cries of all the words in all the books with covers closed.

Rosten, Leo

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

Harington, John

10.

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

11.

Books are but waste paper unless we spend in action the wisdom we get from thought -- asleep. When we are weary of the living, we may repair to the dead, who have nothing of peevishness, pride, or design in their conversation.

Collier, Jeremy

12.

No story is the same to us after a lapse of time; or rather we who read it are no longer the same interpreters.

Eliot, George

13.

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

Colton, Charles Caleb

14.

The reading of all good books is like a conversation with all the finest men of past centuries.

Descartes, Rene

15.

The last thing one discovers in composing a work is what to put first.

Pascal, Blaise

16.

To use books rightly, is to go to them for help; to appeal to them when our own knowledge and power fail; to be led by them into wider sight and purer conception than our own, and to receive from them the united sentence of the judges and councils of all time, against our solitary and unstable opinions.

Ruskin, John

17.

This is not a book. This is libel, slander, defamation of character. This is not a book, in the ordinary sense of the word. No, this is a prolonged insult, a gob of spit in the face of Art, a kick in the pants to God, Man, Destiny, Time, Love, Beauty... what you will. I am going to sing for you, a little off key perhaps, but I will sing.

Miller, Henry

18.

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

19.

A good title is the title of a successful book.

Chandler, Raymond

20.

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

Twain, Mark

21.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

22.

The chief knowledge that a man gets from reading books is the knowledge that very few of them are worth reading.

Mencken, H. L.

23.

The books we think we ought to read are poky, dull, and dry; The books that we would like to read we are ashamed to buy; The books that people talk about we never can recall; And the books that people give us, oh, they're the worst of all.

Wells, Carolyn

24.

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

25.

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

26.

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

Forster, Edward M.

27.

The tools I need for my work are paper, tobacco, food, and a little whiskey.

Faulkner, William

28.

No furniture is so charming as books.

Smith, Sydney

29.

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.

30.

You've really got to start hitting the books because it's no joke out here.

Lee, Spike

31.

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

32.

Books are not absolutely dead things, but do contain a certain potency of life in them, to be as active as the soul whose progeny they are; they preserve, as in a vial, the purest efficacy and extraction of the living intellect that bred them.

Milton, John

33.

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

34.

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

Bevan, Aneurin

35.

Books had instant replay long before televised sports.

Williams, Bert

36.

I feel a kind of reverence for the first books of young authors. There is so much aspiration in them, so much audacious hope and trembling fear, so much of the heart's history, that all errors and shortcomings are for a while lost sight of in the amiable self assertion of youth.

Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth

37.

All the best stories in the world are but one story in reality -- the story of escape. It is the only thing which interests us all and at all times, how to escape.

Benson, Arthur Christopher

38.

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

Carlyle, Thomas

39.

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

Joubert, Joseph

40.

The most foolish kind of a book is a kind of leaky boat on the sea of wisdom; some of the wisdom will get in anyhow.

Holmes, Oliver Wendell

41.

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

42.

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

Twain, Mark

43.

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

Vaneigem, Raoul

44.

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

45.

One sheds one's sicknesses in books -- repeats and presents again one's emotions, to be master of them.

Lawrence, D. H.

46.

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

47.

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

48.

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

49.

Books are lighthouses erected in the great sea of time.

Whipple, Edwin P.

50.

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

Temple, Sir William