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

Much reading is an oppression of the mind, and extinguishes the natural candle, which is the reason of so many senseless scholars in the world.

Penn, William

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

Holmes, Oliver Wendell

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

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

Baker, Nicholson

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

Leacock, Stephen B.

Books and marriage go ill together.

Moliere

Books had instant replay long before televised sports.

Williams, Bert

The reading or non-reading a book will never keep down a single petticoat.

Byron, Lord

Fiction reveals truth that reality obscures.

West, Jessamyn

10.

Books succeed, and lives fail.

Browning, Elizabeth Barrett

11.

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

Secondat, Charles de

12.

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

13.

God be thanked for books; they are the voices of the distant and the dead, and make us heirs of the spiritual life of past ages.

Channing, William Ellery

14.

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

Lichtenberg, Georg C.

15.

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

Carlyle, Thomas

16.

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

Critchfield, Jim

17.

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

Rohn, Jim

18.

Reading furnishes the mind only with material for knowledge; it is thinking that makes what we read ours.

Locke, John

19.

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

20.

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

Hugo, Victor

21.

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

22.

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

Belloc, Hilaire

23.

When a book raises your spirit, and inspires you with noble and manly thoughts, seek for no other test of its excellence. It is good, and made by a good workman.

Bruyere, Jean De La

24.

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

25.

Beware of the person of one book.

Aquinas, St. Thomas

26.

A great book should leave you with many experiences and slightly exhausted at the end. You should live several lives while reading it.

Styron, William

27.

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

Johnson, Samuel

28.

Books are lighthouses erected in the great sea of time.

Whipple, Edwin P.

29.

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

30.

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

Montagu, Lady Mary Wortley

31.

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

32.

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

Lichtenberg, Georg C.

33.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

34.

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

Auden, W. H.

35.

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

Gibbon, Edward

36.

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

Byron, Lord

37.

The books that everybody admires are those that nobody reads.

France, Anatole

38.

Tradition is but a meteor, which, if it once falls, cannot be rekindled. Memory, once interrupted, is not to be recalled. But written learning is a fixed luminary, which, after the cloud that had hidden it has passed away, is again bright in its proper station. So books are faithful repositories, which may be awhile neglected or forgotten, but when opened again, will again impart instruction.

Johnson

39.

The age of the book is almost gone.

Steiner, George

40.

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.

41.

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

42.

A book worth reading is worth buying.

Ruskin, John

43.

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

44.

What we become depends on what we read after all the professors have finished with us. The greatest university of all is the collection of books.

Carlyle, Thomas

45.

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