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

Only a generation of readers will span a generation of writers.

Spielberg, Steven

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

Vaneigem, Raoul

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

Fuller, Margaret

One half who graduate from college never read another book.

True, Herbert

When we read a story, we inhabit it. The covers of the book are like a roof and four walls. What is to happen next will take place within the four walls of the story. And this is possible because the story's voice makes everything its own.

Berger, John

A good title is the title of a successful book.

Chandler, Raymond

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

Rohn, Jim

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 man ought to read just as his inclination leads him; for what he reads as a task will do him little good.

Johnson, Samuel

10.

'Tis pleasant, sure, to see one's name in print; A book's a book, although there's nothing in it.

Byron, Lord

11.

The mortality of all inanimate things is terrible to me, but that of books most of all.

Howells, William Dean

12.

The classics are only primitive literature. They belong to the same class as primitive machinery and primitive music and primitive medicine.

Leacock, Stephen B.

13.

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

Mallarme, Stephane

14.

I am a part of everything that I have read.

Kieran, John

15.

No matter how busy you may think you are, you must find time for reading, or surrender yourself to self-chosen ignorance.

Townsend, Atwood H.

16.

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

17.

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

Phelps, William Lyon

18.

A vacuum of ideas affects people differently than a vacuum of air, otherwise readers of books would be constantly collapsing.

Lichtenberg, Georg C.

19.

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

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.

I've never know any trouble than an hour's reading didn't assuage.

Secondat, Charles de

22.

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

23.

Books are lighthouses erected in the great sea of time.

Whipple, Edwin P.

24.

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

Frost, Robert

25.

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

26.

The great American novel has not only already been written, it has already been rejected.

Dane, Frank

27.

What is reading, but silent conversation.

Landor, Walter Savage

28.

A library is thought in cold storage.

Samuel, Herbert

29.

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

Brookner, Anita

30.

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

Pascal, Blaise

31.

Most books today seemed to have been written overnight from books read the day before.

Chamfort, Sebastien-Roch Nicolas De

32.

A book is a mirror: If an ass peers into it, you can't expect an apostle to look out.

Lichtenberg, Georg C.

33.

There is no such thing as a moral book or an immoral book. Books are well written or badly written. That is all.

Wilde, Oscar

34.

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

Belloc, Hilaire

35.

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

36.

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

37.

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

Colton, Charles Caleb

38.

The newest books are those that never grow old.

Jackson, George Holbrook

39.

Book love... is your pass to the greatest, the purest, and the most perfect pleasure that God has prepared for His creatures.

Trollope, Anthony

40.

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

Camus, Albert

41.

Gross, Jacquelyn

42.

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

Twain, Mark

43.

I am not a speed reader. I am a speed understander.

Asimov, Isaac

44.

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

45.

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

46.

No entertainment is so cheap as reading, nor is any pleasure so lasting.

Montagu, Lady Mary Wortley

47.

Reading a book is like re-writing it for yourself. You bring to a novel, anything you read, all your experience of the world. You bring your history and you read it in your own terms.

Carter, Angela

48.

How many a man has dated a new era in his life from the reading of a book! The book exists for us, perchance, that will explain our miracles and reveal new ones. The at present unutterable things we may find somewhere uttered.

Thoreau, Henry David

49.

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

50.

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