Motivational Quotes

Books - reading

The greatest gift is the passion for reading. It is cheap, it consoles, it distracts, it excites, it gives you knowledge of the world and experience of a wide kind. It is a moral illumination.

- Hardwick, Elizabeth

Best Quotes about Books - reading

I always like to look on the optimistic side of life, but I am realistic enough to know that life is a complex matter.

Disney, Walt

Books are the blessed chloroform of the mind.

Chambers, Robert

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

Howells, William Dean

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

Fuller, Margaret

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

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

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

Camus, Albert

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.

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

10.

The words of my book nothing, the drift of it everything.

Whitman, Walt

11.

A good book is the best of friends, the same today and for ever.

Tupper, Martin

12.

You can either read something many times in order to be assured that you got it all, or else you can define your purpose and use techniques which will assure that you have met it and gotten what you need.

Kump, Peter

13.

People are much more willing to lend you books than bookcases.

Twain, Mark

14.

There are very many people who read simply to prevent themselves from thinking.

Lichtenberg, Georg C.

15.

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

Dane, Frank

16.

No furniture is so charming as books.

Smith, Sydney

17.

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

18.

Books are but waste paper unless we spend in action the wisdom we get from thought -- asleep. When we are weary of the living, we may repair to the dead, who have nothing of peevishness, pride, or design in their conversation.

Collier, Jeremy

19.

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

20.

All the best stories in the world are but one story in reality -- the story of escape. It is the only thing which interests us all and at all times, how to escape.

Benson, Arthur Christopher

21.

A house without books is like a room without windows. No man has a right to bring up his children without surrounding them with books, if he has the means to buy them. It is a wrong to his family. Children learn to read by being in the presence of books. The love of knowledge comes with reading and grows upon it. And the love of knowledge, in a young mind, is almost always a warrant against the inferior excitement of passions and vices.

Mann, Horace

22.

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

23.

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

24.

The reason a writer writes a book is to forget a book and the reason a reader reads one is to remember it.

Wolfe, Thomas

25.

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

Hope, Anthony

26.

A novel is a mirror carried along a main road.

Stendhal, Henri B.

27.

Books are standing counselors and preachers, always at hand, and always disinterested; having this advantage over oral instructors, that they are ready to repeat their lesson as often as we please.

Chambers, Oswald

28.

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

Mallarme, Stephane

29.

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

30.

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

31.

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

Wycherley, William

32.

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

33.

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

Brookner, Anita

34.

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

35.

I suggest that the only books that influence us are those for which we are ready, and which have gone a little further down our particular path than we have yet got ourselves.

Forster, Edward M.

36.

The books one has written in the past have two surprises in store: one couldn't write them again, and wouldn't want to.

Rostand, Jean

37.

Thank you for sending me a copy of your book -- I'll waste no time reading it.

Hadas, Moses

38.

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

Luther, Martin

39.

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.

40.

The pleasure of reading is doubled when one lives with another who shares the same books.

Mansfield, Katherine

41.

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

Rohn, Jim

42.

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

Carlyle, Thomas

43.

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

Maclennan, Hugh

44.

Reading the Scriptures is an uplifting experience.

45.

The books we think we ought to read are poky, dull, and dry; The books that we would like to read we are ashamed to buy; The books that people talk about we never can recall; And the books that people give us, oh, they're the worst of all.

Wells, Carolyn

46.

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

47.

What is reading, but silent conversation.

Landor, Walter Savage

48.

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

49.

A bad book is as much of a labor to write as a good one; it comes as sincerely from the author's soul.

Huxley, Aldous

50.

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