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

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

The tools I need for my work are paper, tobacco, food, and a little whiskey.

Faulkner, William

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

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

Rohn, Jim

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

Hubbard, Elbert

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

Chesterton, Gilbert K.

Who ever converses among old books will be hard to please among the new.

Temple, Sir William

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

Secondat, Charles de

Books are not absolutely dead things, but do contain a certain potency of life in them, to be as active as the soul whose progeny they are; they preserve, as in a vial, the purest efficacy and extraction of the living intellect that bred them.

Milton, John

10.

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

Auden, W. H.

11.

Fiction reveals truth that reality obscures.

West, Jessamyn

12.

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

Carlyle, Thomas

13.

Hypocrite reader -- my fellow -- my brother!

Baudelaire, Charles

14.

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

15.

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

16.

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

Descartes, Rene

17.

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

18.

After all, the world is not a stage -- not to me: nor a theatre: nor a show-house of any sort. And art, especially novels, are not little theatres where the reader sits aloft and watches... and sighs, commiserates, condones and smiles. That's what you want a book to be: because it leaves you so safe and superior, with your two-dollar ticket to the show. And that's what my books are not and never will be. Whoever reads me will be in the thick of the scrimmage, and if he doesn't like it -- if he wants a safe seat in the audience -- let him read someone else.

Lawrence, D. H.

19.

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.

20.

To read too many books is harmful.

Zedong, Mao

21.

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

Bulwer-Lytton, Edward G.

22.

This book is not to be tossed lightly aside, but to be hurled with great force.

Parker, Dorothy

23.

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

Mallarme, Stephane

24.

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.

25.

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

26.

Five daily newspapers arrive in my California driveway. The New York times and the Wall Street Journal are supplemented by three local papers. As for magazines, I read, or at least skim, Business Week, Forbes, The Economist, INC; Industry Week, Fortune. Other subscriptions include Sales and Marketing Management, Modern Health Care, Progressive Grocer, High Tech Business, and Slaon Management Review from MIT. I religiously read Business Tokyo, Asia Week, and Far Eastern Economic Review. I glance at Newsweek and Time ... but I devour the New Republic, Policy Review, Foreign Affairs, The Washington Monthly, and Public Interest. How about books? A dozen or more each month.

Peters, Thomas J.

27.

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

Mencken, H. L.

28.

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

Pound, Ezra

29.

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

Luther, Martin

30.

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

Hadas, Moses

31.

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

32.

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

Belloc, Hilaire

33.

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

Lichtenberg, Georg C.

34.

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

Rohn, Jim

35.

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

Tupper, Martin

36.

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

37.

For a good book has this quality, that it is not merely a petrifaction of its author, but that once it has been tossed behind, like Deucalion's little stone, it acquires a separate and vivid life of its own.

Lejeune, Caroline

38.

No matter how busy you may think you are, you must find time for reading, or surrender yourself to self-chosen ignorance.

Townsend, Atwood H.

39.

There is a set of religious, or rather moral, writings which teach that virtue is the certain road to happiness, and vice to misery in this world. A very wholesome and comfortable doctrine, and to which we have but one objection, namely, that it is not true.

Fielding, Henry

40.

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

41.

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

42.

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

43.

When you have mastered numbers, you will in fact no longer be reading numbers, any more than you read words when reading books You will be reading meanings.

Geneen, Harold S.

44.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

45.

A book that is shut is but a block.

Fuller, Thomas

46.

Our high respect for a well read person is praise enough for literature.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

47.

The more sins you confess, the more books you will sell.

Proverb, American

48.

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

49.

A successful book cannot afford to be more than ten percent new.

Mcluhan, Marshall

50.

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