Motivational Quotes

Books - reading

Learning to read has been reduced to a process of mastering a series of narrow, specific, hierarchical skills. Where armed-forces recruits learn the components of a rifle or the intricacies of close order drill by the numbers, recruits to reading learn its mechanics sound by sound and word by word.

- Gross, Jacquelyn

Best Quotes about Books - reading

Every abridgement of a good book is a fool abridged.

Montaigne, Michel Eyquem De

There is a set of religious, or rather moral, writings which teach that virtue is the certain road to happiness, and vice to misery in this world. A very wholesome and comfortable doctrine, and to which we have but one objection, namely, that it is not true.

Fielding, Henry

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

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

Lee, Spike

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

Lee, Harper

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

Many books require no thought from those who read them, and for a very simple reason: they made no such demand upon those who wrote them. Those works, therefore, are the most valuable, that set our thinking faculties in the fullest operation. understand them.

Clarendon

A conventional good read is usually a bad read, a relaxing bath in what we know already. A true good read is surely an act of innovative creation in which we, the readers, become conspirators.

Bradbury, Malcolm

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

Voltaire

10.

For a good book has this quality, that it is not merely a petrifaction of its author, but that once it has been tossed behind, like Deucalion's little stone, it acquires a separate and vivid life of its own.

Lejeune, Caroline

11.

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

12.

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

13.

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

Maclennan, Hugh

14.

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''

15.

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

Sandwell, B. K.

16.

I would sooner read a timetable or a catalog than nothing at all.

Maugham, W. Somerset

17.

When I get a little money, I buy books; and if any is left I buy food and clothes.

Erasmus, Desiderius

18.

I used to walk to school with my nose buried in a book.

Coolio

19.

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

20.

If a secret history of books could be written, and the author's private thoughts and meanings noted down alongside of his story, how many insipid volumes would become interesting, and dull tales excite the reader!

Thackeray, William M.

21.

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

22.

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

23.

A person who publishes a book appears willfully in public with his pants down.

Millay, Edna St. Vincent

24.

There is no robber worse than a bad book.

Proverb, Italian

25.

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

26.

I always like to look on the optimistic side of life, but I am realistic enough to know that life is a complex matter.

Disney, Walt

27.

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

28.

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

Whitman, Walt

29.

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

Jackson, Holbrook

30.

Very young children eat their books, literally devouring their contents. This is one reason for the scarcity of first editions of Alice in Wonderland and other favorites of the nursery.

Rosenbach, A. S. W.

31.

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

32.

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

Carey, Joyce

33.

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

Twain, Mark

34.

To buy books would be a good thing if we also could buy the time to read them.

Schopenhauer, Arthur

35.

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

36.

People are much more willing to lend you books than bookcases.

Twain, Mark

37.

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

Holmes, Oliver Wendell

38.

There is creative reading as well as creative writing.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

39.

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

40.

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

41.

Hypocrite reader -- my fellow -- my brother!

Baudelaire, Charles

42.

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

43.

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

Bulwer-Lytton, Edward G.

44.

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

45.

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

Hood, Thomas

46.

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

47.

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

Disraeli, Benjamin

48.

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

49.

You will find most books worth reading are worth reading twice.

Morely, John

50.

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.