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

What is reading, but silent conversation.

Landor, Walter Savage

Any book that helps a child to form a habit of reading, to make reading one of his deep and continuing needs, is good for him.

McKenna, Richard

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

No story is the same to us after a lapse of time; or rather we who read it are no longer the same interpreters.

Eliot, George

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

Porter, Noah

How can you dare teach a man to read until you've taught him everything else first?

Shaw, George Bernard

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

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

Harington, John

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

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.

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

12.

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

Rohn, Jim

13.

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

14.

There is more treasure in books than in all the pirates loot on Treasure Island and best of all, you can enjoy these riches every day of your life.

Disney, Walt

15.

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

Rohn, Jim

16.

If I had my way books would not be written in English, but in an exceedingly difficult secret language that only skilled professional readers and story-tellers could interpret. Then people like you would have to go to public halls and pay good prices to hear the professionals decode and read the books aloud for you. This plan would have the advantage of scaring off all amateur authors, retired politicians, country doctors and I-Married-a-Midget writers who would not have the patience to learn the secret language.

Davies, Robertson

17.

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

18.

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

19.

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

Lee, Spike

20.

Begin to read a book that will help you move toward your dream.

Brown, Les

21.

The most foolish kind of a book is a kind of leaky boat on the sea of wisdom; some of the wisdom will get in anyhow.

Holmes, Oliver Wendell

22.

Prerequisite for rereadability in books: that they be forgettable.

Rostand, Jean

23.

Readers are plentiful: thinkers are rare.

Martineau, Harriet

24.

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

25.

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.

26.

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''

27.

A good book is the very essence of a good man. His virtues survive in it, while the foibles and faults of his actual life are forgotten. All the goodly company of the excellent and great sit around my table, or look down on me from yonder shelves, waiting patiently to answer my questions and enrich me with their wisdom. A precious book is a foretaste of immortality.

Cuyler, Theodore L.

28.

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

29.

There are two kinds of books. Those that no one reads and those that no one ought to read.

Mencken, H. L.

30.

Every abridgement of a good book is a fool abridged.

Montaigne, Michel Eyquem De

31.

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

Jackson, Holbrook

32.

Except a living man there is nothing more wonderful than a book! a message to us from the dead -- from human souls we never saw, who lived, perhaps, thousands of miles away. And yet these, in those little sheets of paper, speak to us, arouse us, terrify us, teach us, comfort us, open their hearts to us as brothers.

Kingsley, Charles

33.

Reading is equivalent to thinking with someone else's head instead of with one's own.

Schopenhauer, Arthur

34.

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

Howells, William Dean

35.

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

36.

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

Colton, Charles Caleb

37.

The books that everybody admires are those that nobody reads.

France, Anatole

38.

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

Dawkins, John

39.

In the case of good books, the point is not how many of them you can get through, but rather how many can get through to you.

Adler, Mortimer J.

40.

We are too civil to books. For a few golden sentences we will turn over and actually read a volume of four or five hundred pages.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

41.

Hypocrite reader -- my fellow -- my brother!

Baudelaire, Charles

42.

The book to read is not the one which thinks for you, but the one which makes you think. No book in the world equals the Bible for that.

Mccosh

43.

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

Phelps, William Lyon

44.

Books are the bees which carry the quickening pollen from one to another mind.

Lowell, James Russell

45.

A bibliophile of little means is likely to suffer often. Books don't slip from his hands but fly past him through the air, high as birds, high as prices.

Neruda, Pablo

46.

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

Voltaire

47.

To read too many books is harmful.

Zedong, Mao

48.

No furniture is so charming as books.

Smith, Sydney

49.

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

50.

The multitude of books is a great evil. There is no limit to this fever for writing.

Luther, Martin