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

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

Mansfield, Katherine

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

Forster, Edward M.

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

Gibbon, Edward

Next, in importance to books are their titles.

Davies, Paul

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

Porter, Noah

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

Hadas, Moses

There is no robber worse than a bad book.

Proverb, Italian

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

Dawkins, John

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

10.

When I get a little money, I buy books; and if any is left I buy food and clothes.

Erasmus, Desiderius

11.

Every man is a volume if you know how to read him.

Channing, William Ellery

12.

Don't ask me who's influenced me. A lion is made up of the lambs he's digested, and I've been reading all my life.

Seferis, Giorgos

13.

I am what libraries and librarians have made me, with little assistance from a professor of Greek and poets.

Sandwell, B. K.

14.

Books and marriage go ill together.

Moliere

15.

Every abridgement of a good book is a fool abridged.

Montaigne, Michel Eyquem De

16.

Books succeed, and lives fail.

Browning, Elizabeth Barrett

17.

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

18.

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

Dane, Frank

19.

Hypocrite reader -- my fellow -- my brother!

Baudelaire, Charles

20.

My books kept me from the ring, the dog-pit, the tavern, and the saloon.

Hood, Thomas

21.

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.

22.

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

23.

The book salesman should be honored because he brings to our attention, as a rule, the very books we need most and neglect most.

Crane, Frank

24.

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

25.

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

Locke, John

26.

Here, my dear Lucy, hide these books. Quick, quick! Fling Peregrine Pickle under the toilette --throw Roderick Random into the closet --put The Innocent Adultery into The Whole Duty of Man; thrust Lord Aimworth under the sofa! cram Ovid behind the bolster; there --put The Man of Feeling into your pocket. Now for them.

Sheridan, Richard Brinsley

27.

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

Mallarme, Stephane

28.

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

29.

How many a man has dated a new era in his life from the reading of a book! The book exists for us, perchance, that will explain our miracles and reveal new ones. The at present unutterable things we may find somewhere uttered.

Thoreau, Henry David

30.

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

Byron, Lord

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.

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

33.

The worst readers are those who behave like plundering troops: they take away a few things they can use, dirty and confound the remainder, and revile the whole.

Nietzsche, Friedrich

34.

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

35.

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

Pound, Ezra

36.

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.

37.

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

Lichtenberg, Georg C.

38.

The printing press is either the greatest blessing or the greatest curse of modern times, sometimes one forgets which it is.

Barrie, Sir James M.

39.

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

40.

A good title is the title of a successful book.

Chandler, Raymond

41.

The real risks for any artist are taken in pushing the work to the limits of what is possible, in the attempt to increase the sum of what it is possible to think. Books become good when they go to this edge and risk falling over it --when they endanger the artist by reason of what he has, or has not, artistically dared.

Rushdie, Salman

42.

In science, read by preference the newest works. In literature, read the oldest. The classics are always modern.

Lytton, Lord Edward

43.

The chief knowledge that a man gets from reading books is the knowledge that very few of them are worth reading.

Mencken, H. L.

44.

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

Forster, Edward M.

45.

I know every book of mine by its smell, and I have but to put my nose between the pages to be reminded of all sorts of things.

Gissing, George Robert

46.

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

47.

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

Holmes, Oliver Wendell

48.

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

Faulkner, William

49.

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

Critchfield, Jim

50.

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