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

I am not a speed reader. I am a speed understander.

Asimov, Isaac

The most foolish kind of a book is a kind of leaky boat on the sea of wisdom; some of the wisdom will get in anyhow.

Holmes, Oliver Wendell

The newest books are those that never grow old.

Jackson, George Holbrook

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

Johnson, Samuel

A book worth reading is worth buying.

Ruskin, John

The age of the book is almost gone.

Steiner, George

Begin to read a book that will help you move toward your dream.

Brown, Les

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

Tupper, Martin

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.

A man ought to read just as his inclination leads him; for what he reads as a task will do him little good.

Johnson, Samuel

11.

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

Auden, W. H.

12.

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

13.

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

Mccay, James T.

14.

A big leather-bound volume makes an ideal razor strap. A thin book is useful to stick under a table with a broken caster to steady it. A large, flat atlas can be used to cover a window with a broken pane. And a thick, old-fashioned heavy book with a clasp is the finest thing in the world to throw at a noisy cat.

Twain, Mark

15.

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

Carlyle, Thomas

16.

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

Byron, Lord

17.

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

Mansfield, Katherine

18.

Books are the bees which carry the quickening pollen from one to another mind.

Lowell, James Russell

19.

A novel is a mirror carried along a main road.

Stendhal, Henri B.

20.

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

21.

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

Parker, Dorothy

22.

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

Ruskin, John

23.

A library is thought in cold storage.

Samuel, Herbert

24.

Many books require no thought from those who read them, and for a very simple reason: they made no such demand upon those who wrote them. Those works, therefore, are the most valuable, that set our thinking faculties in the fullest operation. understand them.

Clarendon

25.

Reading is to the mind what exercise is to the body. It is wholesome and bracing for the mind to have its faculties kept on the stretch.

Steele, Sir Richard

26.

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

Mcluhan, Marshall

27.

Books are not men and yet they stay alive.

Benet, Stephen Vincent

28.

Early in the morning, at break of day, in all the freshness and dawn of one's strength, to read a book --I call that vicious!

Nietzsche, Friedrich

29.

Reading is a basic tool in the living of a good life.

Adler, Mortimer J.

30.

Do we write books so that they shall merely be read? Don't we also write them for employment in the household? For one that is read from start to finish, thousands are leafed through, other thousands lie motionless, others are jammed against mouseholes, thrown at rats, others are stood on, sat on, drummed on, have gingerbread baked on them or are used to light pipes.

Lichtenberg, Georg C.

31.

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

32.

We are too civil to books. For a few golden sentences we will turn over and actually read a volume of four or five hundred pages.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

33.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

34.

Books constitute capital. A library book lasts as long as a house, for hundreds of years. It is not, then, an article of mere consumption but fairly of capital, and often in the case of professional men, setting out in life, it is their only capital.

Jefferson, Thomas

35.

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

36.

Hypocrite reader -- my fellow -- my brother!

Baudelaire, Charles

37.

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

Fuller, Margaret

38.

Prerequisite for rereadability in books: that they be forgettable.

Rostand, Jean

39.

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

40.

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

41.

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

42.

What is the most precious, the most exciting smell awaiting you in the house when you return to it after a dozen years or so? The smell of roses, you think? No, moldering books.

Sinyavsky, Andre

43.

The classics are only primitive literature. They belong to the same class as primitive machinery and primitive music and primitive medicine.

Leacock, Stephen B.

44.

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

Hood, Thomas

45.

My books are water; those of the great geniuses are wine -- everybody drinks water.

Twain, Mark

46.

Learning to read has been reduced to a process of mastering a series of narrow, specific, hierarchical skills. Where armed-forces recruits learn the components of a rifle or the intricacies of close order drill by the numbers, recruits to reading learn its mechanics sound by sound and word by word.

Gross, Jacquelyn

47.

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

Sandwell, B. K.

48.

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

Whitman, Walt

49.

Books in a large university library system: 2, 000,000. Books in an average large city library: 1 0,000. Average number of books in a chain bookstore: 30, 000. Books in an average neighborhood branch library: 20, 000.

Horowitz, Lois

50.

Books are lighthouses erected in the great sea of time.

Whipple, Edwin P.