Motivational Quotes

Books - reading

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

- Harington, John

Best Quotes about Books - reading

Everywhere I have sought rest and not found it, except sitting in a corner by myself with a little book.

Kempis, Thomas

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

Holmes, Oliver Wendell

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

Howells, William Dean

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

Colton, Charles Caleb

A multitude of books distracts the mind.

Socrates

Readers are less and less seen as mere non-writers, the subhuman other or flawed derivative of the author; the lack of a pen is no longer a shameful mark of secondary status but a positively enabling space, just as within every writer can be seen to lurk, as a repressed but contaminating antithesis, a reader.

Eagleton, Terry

The reason that fiction is more interesting than any other form of literature, to those who really like to study people, is that in fiction the author can really tell the truth without humiliating himself.

Roosevelt, Eleanor

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

Tupper, Martin

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.

10.

The world may be full of fourth-rate writers but it's also full of fourth-rate readers.

Barstow, Stan

11.

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

12.

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

13.

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

14.

Everything in this book may be wrong. [The Savior's Manual]

Bach, Richard

15.

What is reading, but silent conversation.

Landor, Walter Savage

16.

Books, books, books had found the secret of a garret-room piled high with cases in my father's name; Piled high, packed large, --where, creeping in and out among the giant fossils of my past, like some small nimble mouse between the ribs of a mastodon, I nibbled here and there at this or that box, pulling through the gap, in heats of terror, haste, victorious joy, the first book first. And how I felt it beat under my pillow, in the morning's dark. An hour before the sun would let me read! My books!

Browning, Elizabeth Barrett

17.

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

Twain, Mark

18.

Books are not men and yet they stay alive.

Benet, Stephen Vincent

19.

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

Mencken, H. L.

20.

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

Parker, Dorothy

21.

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

Johnson, Samuel

22.

Nine-tenths of the existing books are nonsense and the clever books are the refutation of that nonsense.

Disraeli, Benjamin

23.

Read, read, read. Read everything-- trash, classics, good and bad, and see how they do it. Just like a carpenter who works as an apprentice and studies the master. Read! You'll absorb it. Then write. If it is good, you'll find out. If it's not, throw it out the window.

Faulkner, William

24.

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

Secondat, Charles de

25.

You should read books like you take medicine, by advice, and not by advertisement.

Ruskin, John

26.

Books had instant replay long before televised sports.

Williams, Bert

27.

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''

28.

There is creative reading as well as creative writing.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

29.

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.

30.

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

Montagu, Lady Mary Wortley

31.

The Brahmins say that in their books there are many predictions of times in which it will rain. But press those books as strongly as you can, you can not get out of them a drop of water. So you can not get out of all the books that contain the best precepts the smallest good deed.

Tolstoy, Count Leo

32.

In any situation, ask yourself: What strengths do I possess that can contribute towards accomplishing something in this situation? Then follow through.

33.

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

34.

I can't bear art that you can walk round and admire. A book should be either a bandit or a rebel or a man in the crowd.

Lawrence, D. H.

35.

The newest books are those that never grow old.

Jackson, George Holbrook

36.

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.

37.

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

38.

Then I though of reading -- the nice and subtle happiness of reading ... this joy not dulled by age, this polite and unpunishable vice, this selfish, serene, lifelong intoxication.

Smith, Logan Pearsall

39.

Books are the best of things if well used; if abused, among the worst. They are good for nothing but to inspire. I had better never see a book than be warped by its attraction clean out of my own orbit, and made a satellite instead of a system.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

40.

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

Phelps, William Lyon

41.

What is important is not to be able to read rapidly, but to be able to decide what not to read.

Mccay, James T.

42.

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

43.

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

44.

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

Mansfield, Katherine

45.

One half who graduate from college never read another book.

True, Herbert

46.

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

47.

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

48.

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.

49.

To sit alone in the lamplight with a book spread out before you hold intimate converse with men of unseen generations -- such is pleasure beyond compare.

Kenko, Yoshida

50.

We ought to reverence books; to look on them as useful and mighty things. If they are good and true, whether they are about religion, politics, farming, trade, law, or medicine, they are the message of Christ, the maker of all things -- the teacher of all truth.

Kingsley, Charles