Motivational Quotes

Books - reading

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

Best Quotes about Books - reading

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

Hope, Anthony

Does there, I wonder, exist a being who has read all, or approximately all, that the person of average culture is supposed to have read, and that not to have read is a social sin? If such a being does exist, surely he is an old, a very old man.

Bennett, Arnold

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

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

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

Montagu, Lady Mary Wortley

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

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

Milton, John

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

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

Adler, Mortimer J.

10.

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

Harington, John

11.

A book is like a man -- clever and dull, brave and cowardly, beautiful and ugly. For every flowering thought there will be a page like a wet and mangy mongrel, and for every looping flight a tap on the wing and a reminder that wax cannot hold the feathers firm too near the sun.

Steinbeck, John

12.

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

13.

You are wise, witty and wonderful, but you spend too much time reading this sort of stuff.

Critchfield, Jim

14.

It is from books that wise people derive consolation in the troubles of life.

Hugo, Victor

15.

No one can read with profit that which he cannot learn to read with pleasure.

Porter, Noah

16.

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

Ruskin, John

17.

Books are lighthouses erected in the great sea of time.

Whipple, Edwin P.

18.

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

19.

It does not follow because many books are written by persons born in America that there exists an American literature. Books which imitate or represent the thoughts and life of Europe do not constitute an American literature. Before such can exist, an original idea must animate this nation and fresh currents of life must call into life fresh thoughts along the shore.

Fuller, Margaret

20.

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

Brookner, Anita

21.

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

Maclennan, Hugh

22.

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

Mccay, James T.

23.

The books that everybody admires are those that nobody reads.

France, Anatole

24.

The flood of print has turned reading into a process of gulping rather than savoring

Chappell, Warren

25.

What is reading, but silent conversation.

Landor, Walter Savage

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.

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

Asimov, Isaac

28.

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

Johnson, Samuel

29.

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

30.

Today a reader, tomorrow a leader.

Fusselman, W.

31.

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

32.

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

Descartes, Rene

33.

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

Holmes, Oliver Wendell

34.

The mere brute pleasure of reading --the sort of pleasure a cow must have in grazing.

Chesterton, Gilbert K.

35.

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

Butler, Samuel

36.

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

Spielberg, Steven

37.

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

Millay, Edna St. Vincent

38.

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

Phelps, William Lyon

39.

Hypocrite reader -- my fellow -- my brother!

Baudelaire, Charles

40.

A book may be compared to your neighbor: if it be good, it cannot last too long; if bad, you cannot get rid of it too early.

Brooke, Rupert

41.

An empty book is like an infant's soul, in which anything may be written. It is capable of all things, but containeth nothing. I have a mind to fill this with profitable wonders.

Traherne, Thomas

42.

I wish I could write a beautiful book to break those hearts that are soon to cease to exist: a book of faith and small neat worlds and of people who live by the philosophies of popular songs.

43.

A big leather-bound volume makes an ideal razor strap. A thin book is useful to stick under a table with a broken caster to steady it. A large, flat atlas can be used to cover a window with a broken pane. And a thick, old-fashioned heavy book with a clasp is the finest thing in the world to throw at a noisy cat.

Twain, Mark

44.

Thy books should, like thy friends, not many be, yet such wherein men may thy judgment see.

Wycherley, William

45.

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

Lytton, Lord Edward

46.

Readers are less and less seen as mere non-writers, the subhuman other or flawed derivative of the author; the lack of a pen is no longer a shameful mark of secondary status but a positively enabling space, just as within every writer can be seen to lurk, as a repressed but contaminating antithesis, a reader.

Eagleton, Terry

47.

Next, in importance to books are their titles.

Davies, Paul

48.

My early and invincible love of reading I would not exchange for all the riches of India.

Gibbon, Edward

49.

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

Mencken, H. L.

50.

The books that the world calls immoral are the books that show the world its own shame.