Motivational Quotes

Books - reading

If I have not read a book before, it is, for all intents and purposes, new to me whether it was printed yesterday or three hundred years ago.

- Hazlitt, William

Best Quotes about Books - reading

A multitude of books distracts the mind.

Socrates

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

Lichtenberg, Georg C.

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

Ruskin, John

It is books that teach us to refine our pleasures when young, and to recall them with satisfaction when we are old.

Hunt, Leigh

Digressions, incontestably, are the sunshine; they are the life, the soul of reading! Take them out of this book, for instance, --you might as well take the book along with them; --one cold external winter would reign in every page of it; restore them to the writer; --he steps forth like a bridegroom, --bids All-hail; brings in variety, and forbids the appetite to fail.

Sterne, Laurence

I am a part of everything that I have read.

Kieran, John

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

Pound, Ezra

A library is thought in cold storage.

Samuel, Herbert

Every abridgement of a good book is a fool abridged.

Montaigne, Michel Eyquem De

10.

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''

11.

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

12.

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

13.

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

Twain, Mark

14.

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

15.

Of all the ways of acquiring books, writing them oneself is regarded as the most praiseworthy method. Writers are really people who write books not because they are poor, but because they are dissatisfied with the books which they could buy but do not like.

Benjamin, Walter

16.

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

Proverb, American

17.

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

Maclennan, Hugh

18.

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

Chesterton, Gilbert K.

19.

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

Mansfield, Katherine

20.

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

Tupper, Martin

21.

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

Fuller, Margaret

22.

I used to walk to school with my nose buried in a book.

Coolio

23.

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

24.

Very young children eat their books, literally devouring their contents. This is one reason for the scarcity of first editions of Alice in Wonderland and other favorites of the nursery.

Rosenbach, A. S. W.

25.

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

26.

A conventional good read is usually a bad read, a relaxing bath in what we know already. A true good read is surely an act of innovative creation in which we, the readers, become conspirators.

Bradbury, Malcolm

27.

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

Sandwell, B. K.

28.

To learn to read is to light a fire; every syllable that is spelled out is a spark.

Hugo, Victor

29.

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

30.

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

Bach, Richard

31.

He has only half learned the art of reading who has not added to it the more refined art of skipping and skimming.

Balfour, Arthur James

32.

Books had instant replay long before televised sports.

Williams, Bert

33.

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

34.

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

35.

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

36.

A book may be compared to your neighbor: if it be good, it cannot last too long; if bad, you cannot get rid of it too early.

Brooke, Rupert

37.

No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader.

Frost, Robert

38.

A novel is a mirror carried along a main road.

Stendhal, Henri B.

39.

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

40.

Reading makes immigrants of us all. It takes us away from home, but more important, it finds homes for us everywhere.

Rochman, Hazel

41.

Readers are plentiful: thinkers are rare.

Martineau, Harriet

42.

Books are the blessed chloroform of the mind.

Chambers, Robert

43.

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.

44.

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

45.

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

Voltaire

46.

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

47.

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

48.

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

49.

The books that everybody admires are those that nobody reads.

France, Anatole

50.

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