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

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

Mencken, H. L.

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

Luther, Martin

Reading furnishes the mind only with material for knowledge; it is thinking that makes what we read ours.

Locke, John

Fiction reveals truth that reality obscures.

West, Jessamyn

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

Kempis, Thomas

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

I am what libraries and librarians have made me, with little assistance from a professor of Greek and poets.

Sandwell, B. K.

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

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

10.

Old books, you know well, are books of the world's youth, and new books are the fruits of its age.

Holmes, Oliver Wendell

11.

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

Brodsky, Joseph

12.

We are too civil to books. For a few golden sentences we will turn over and actually read a volume of four or five hundred pages.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

13.

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

Tupper, Martin

14.

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

15.

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

16.

Miss a meal if you have to, but don't miss a book.

Rohn, Jim

17.

Once we have learned to read, meaning of words can somehow register without consciousness.

Marcel, Anthony

18.

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

19.

The printing press is either the greatest blessing or the greatest curse of modern times, sometimes one forgets which it is.

Barrie, Sir James M.

20.

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

21.

When the book comes out it may hurt you -- but in order for me to do it, it had to hurt me first. I can only tell you about yourself as much as I can face about myself.

Baldwin, James

22.

A bibliophile of little means is likely to suffer often. Books don't slip from his hands but fly past him through the air, high as birds, high as prices.

Neruda, Pablo

23.

The book you don't read won't help.

Rohn, Jim

24.

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

25.

The novel can't compete with cars, the movies, television, and liquor. A guy who's had a good feed and tanked up on good wine gives his old lady a kiss after supper and his day is over. Finished.

Celine, Louis-Ferdinand

26.

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.

27.

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

28.

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

29.

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

Forster, Edward M.

30.

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

31.

No furniture is so charming as books.

Smith, Sydney

32.

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

Camus, Albert

33.

Americans will listen, but they do not care to read. War and Peace must wait for the leisure of retirement, which never really comes: meanwhile it helps to furnish the living room. Blockbusting fiction is bought as furniture. Unread, it maintains its value. Read, it looks like money wasted. Cunningly, Americans know that books contain a person, and they want the person, not the book.

Burgess, Anthony

34.

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

Butler, Samuel

35.

Books that you carry to the fire, and hold readily in your hand, are most useful after all.

Johnson, Samuel

36.

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

Lee, Harper

37.

Education... has produced a vast population able to read but unable to distinguish what is worth reading, an easy prey to sensations and cheap appeals.

Trevelyan, G. M.

38.

Books are not men and yet they stay alive.

Benet, Stephen Vincent

39.

No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader.

Frost, Robert

40.

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

Bach, Richard

41.

Everything in the world exists to end up in a book.

Mallarme, Stephane

42.

Most books, like their authors, are born to die; of only a few books can it be said that death has no dominion over them; they live, and their influence lives forever.

Swartz, J.

43.

My books kept me from the ring, the dog-pit, the tavern, and the saloon.

Hood, Thomas

44.

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

Channing, William Ellery

45.

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

46.

What is important is not to be able to read rapidly, but to be able to decide what not to read.

Mccay, James T.

47.

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

48.

Every abridgement of a good book is a fool abridged.

Montaigne, Michel Eyquem De

49.

A novel is a mirror carried along a main road.

Stendhal, Henri B.

50.

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