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

Those who do not read are no better off than those who cannot read.

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

Lawrence, D. H.

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

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

Forster, Edward M.

There is no robber worse than a bad book.

Proverb, Italian

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

Vaneigem, Raoul

When you reread a classic, you do not see more in the book than you did before; you see more in you than there was before.

Fadiman, Clifton

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

Millay, Edna St. Vincent

A wicked book cannot repent.

Proverb

10.

A real book is not one that we read, but one that reads us.

Auden, W. H.

11.

There are books so alive that you're always afraid that while you weren't reading, the book has gone and changed, has shifted like a river; while you went on living, it went on living too, and like a river moved on and moved away. No one has stepped twice into the same river. But did anyone ever step twice into the same book?

Tsvetaeva, Marina

12.

Books are the best of things if well used; if abused, among the worst. They are good for nothing but to inspire. I had better never see a book than be warped by its attraction clean out of my own orbit, and made a satellite instead of a system.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

13.

I feel a kind of reverence for the first books of young authors. There is so much aspiration in them, so much audacious hope and trembling fear, so much of the heart's history, that all errors and shortcomings are for a while lost sight of in the amiable self assertion of youth.

Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth

14.

Some books leave us free and some books make us free.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

15.

Beware of the person of one book.

Aquinas, St. Thomas

16.

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

Spielberg, Steven

17.

A good title is the title of a successful book.

Chandler, Raymond

18.

Until it is kindled by a spirit as flamingly alive as the one which gave it birth a book is dead to us. Words divested of their magic are but dead hieroglyphs.

Miller, Henry

19.

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

20.

Fiction reveals truth that reality obscures.

West, Jessamyn

21.

Then I though of reading -- the nice and subtle happiness of reading ... this joy not dulled by age, this polite and unpunishable vice, this selfish, serene, lifelong intoxication.

Smith, Logan Pearsall

22.

The Bible remained for me a book of books, still divine -- but divine in the sense that all great books are divine which teach men how to live righteously.

Keith, Sir Arthur

23.

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

Bulwer-Lytton, Edward G.

24.

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

Mccay, James T.

25.

I heard his library burned down and both books were destroyed -- and one of them hadn't even been colored in yet.

Dawkins, John

26.

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

Twain, Mark

27.

No man understands a deep book until he has seen and lived at least part of its contents.

Pound, Ezra

28.

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

Rohn, Jim

29.

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

Marcel, Anthony

30.

The reason that fiction is more interesting than any other form of literature, to those who really like to study people, is that in fiction the author can really tell the truth without humiliating himself.

Roosevelt, Eleanor

31.

This will never be a civilized country until we expend more money for books than we do for chewing gum.

Hubbard, Elbert

32.

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

33.

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

34.

Somewhere, everywhere, now hidden, now apparent in what ever is written down, is the form of a human being. If we seek to know him, are we idly occupied?

Woolf, Virginia

35.

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

Rohn, Jim

36.

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

37.

The books that everybody admires are those that nobody reads.

France, Anatole

38.

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

Bevan, Aneurin

39.

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

40.

I don't think any good book is based on factual experience. Bad books are about things the writer already knew before he wrote them.

Fuentes, Carlos

41.

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

Dane, Frank

42.

The best effect of any book, is that it excites the reader to self-activity.

Carlyle, Thomas

43.

To feel most beautifully alive means to be reading something beautiful, ready always to apprehend in the flow of language the sudden flash of poetry.

Bachelard, Gaston

44.

Next, in importance to books are their titles.

Davies, Paul

45.

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

46.

If a book comes from the heart it will contrive to reach other hearts. All art and author craft are of small account to that.

Carlyle, Thomas

47.

The newest books are those that never grow old.

Jackson, George Holbrook

48.

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

49.

Footnotes are the finer-suckered surfaces that allow testicular paragraphs to hold fast to the wider reality of the library.

Baker, Nicholson

50.

The successful Accelerated Reader is able to read larger than normal blocks or bites of the printed page with each eye stop. He has accepted, without reservation, the philosophy that the most important benefit of reading is the gaining of information, ideas, mental picture and entertainment-not the fretting over words. He has come to the realization that words in and of themselves are for the most part insignificant.

Cutler, Wade E.