Motivational Quotes

Books - reading

As writers become more numerous, it is natural for readers to become more indolent; whence must necessarily arise a desire of attaining knowledge with the greatest possible ease.

- Goldsmith, Oliver

Best Quotes about Books - reading

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

Sandwell, B. K.

From the moment I picked your book up until I laid it down I was convulsed with laughter. Some day I intend reading it.

Marx, Groucho

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

Mencken, H. L.

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

Ruskin, John

In science, read by preference the newest works. In literature, read the oldest. The classics are always modern.

Lytton, Lord Edward

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

Lichtenberg, Georg C.

Books are not men and yet they stay alive.

Benet, Stephen Vincent

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

Kempis, Thomas

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

Descartes, Rene

10.

There is creative reading as well as creative writing.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

11.

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

12.

Read nothing that you do not care to remember, and remember nothing you do not mean to use.

Blackie, Professor

13.

She could give herself up to the written word as naturally as a good dancer to music or a fine swimmer to water. The only difficulty was that after finishing the last sentence she was left with a feeling at once hollow and uncomfortably full. Exactly like indigestion.

Rhys, Jean

14.

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.

15.

The good of a book lies in its being read. A book is made up of signs that speak of other signs, which in their turn speak of things. Without an eye to read them, a book contains signs that produce no concepts; therefore it is dumb.

Eco, Umberto

16.

The newest books are those that never grow old.

Jackson, George Holbrook

17.

A book might be written on the injustice of the just.

Hope, Anthony

18.

He has only half learned the art of reading who has not added to it the more refined art of skipping and skimming.

Balfour, Arthur James

19.

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

Belloc, Hilaire

20.

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

Forster, Edward M.

21.

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

22.

The age of the book is almost gone.

Steiner, George

23.

A book is a part of life, a manifestation of life, just as much as a tree or a horse or a star. It obeys its own rhythms, its own laws, whether it be a novel, a play, or a diary. The deep, hidden rhythm of life is always there -- that of the pulse, the heart beat.

Miller, Henry

24.

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

Rohn, Jim

25.

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

26.

Books had instant replay long before televised sports.

Williams, Bert

27.

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

Adler, Mortimer J.

28.

Books in a large university library system: 2, 000,000. Books in an average large city library: 1 0,000. Average number of books in a chain bookstore: 30, 000. Books in an average neighborhood branch library: 20, 000.

Horowitz, Lois

29.

Books succeed, and lives fail.

Browning, Elizabeth Barrett

30.

A multitude of books distracts the mind.

Socrates

31.

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.

32.

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

33.

Read good, big important things.

Noonan, Peggy

34.

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

Bevan, Aneurin

35.

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

Whitman, Walt

36.

The book to read is not the one which thinks for you, but the one which makes you think. No book in the world equals the Bible for that.

Mccosh

37.

The pleasure of reading is doubled when one lives with another who shares the same books.

Mansfield, Katherine

38.

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

39.

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

Mccay, James T.

40.

To read well, that is, to read true books in a true spirit, is a noble exercise, and one that will task the reader more than any other exercise which the customs of the day esteem. It requires a training such as the athletes underwent, the steady intention almost of the whole life to this object.

Thoreau, Henry David

41.

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

Camus, Albert

42.

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

Brookner, Anita

43.

I divide all readers into two classes: those who read to remember and those who read to forget.

Phelps, William Lyon

44.

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

Johnson, Samuel

45.

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

Hugo, Victor

46.

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

Lawrence, D. H.

47.

The reason a writer writes a book is to forget a book and the reason a reader reads one is to remember it.

Wolfe, Thomas

48.

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.

49.

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

50.

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