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

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

Disraeli, Benjamin

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

You can either read something many times in order to be assured that you got it all, or else you can define your purpose and use techniques which will assure that you have met it and gotten what you need.

Kump, Peter

In the case of good books, the point is not how many of them you can get through, but rather how many can get through to you.

Adler, Mortimer J.

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

Johnson, Samuel

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

I feel a kind of reverence for the first books of young authors. There is so much aspiration in them, so much audacious hope and trembling fear, so much of the heart's history, that all errors and shortcomings are for a while lost sight of in the amiable self assertion of youth.

Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth

Books are masters who instruct us without rods or ferules, without words or anger, without bread or money. If you approach them, they are not asleep; if you seek them, they do not hide; if you blunder, they do not scold; if you are ignorant, they do not laugh at you.

Bury, Richard De

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

Dawkins, John

10.

The newest books are those that never grow old.

Jackson, George Holbrook

11.

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

Pound, Ezra

12.

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

Phelps, William Lyon

13.

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.

14.

You will find most books worth reading are worth reading twice.

Morely, John

15.

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

16.

Education... has produced a vast population able to read but unable to distinguish what is worth reading, an easy prey to sensations and cheap appeals.

Trevelyan, G. M.

17.

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

18.

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

Tupper, Martin

19.

The world of books is the most remarkable creation of man nothing else that he builds ever lasts monuments fall; nations perish; civilization grow old and die out; new races build others. But in the world of books are volumes that have seen this happen again and again and yet live on. Still young, still as fresh as the day they were written, still telling men's hearts, of the hearts of men centuries dead.

Day, Clarence

20.

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

Whitman, Walt

21.

Beware you be not swallowed up in books! An ounce of love is worth a pound of knowledge.

Wesley, John

22.

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

Mencken, H. L.

23.

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

Porter, Noah

24.

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

25.

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

Brown, Les

26.

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

27.

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

Channing, William Ellery

28.

Old books that have ceased to be of service should no more be abandoned than should old friends who have ceased to give pleasure.

Worsthorne, Sir Peregrine

29.

When the book comes out it may hurt you -- but in order for me to do it, it had to hurt me first. I can only tell you about yourself as much as I can face about myself.

Baldwin, James

30.

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

31.

There are books so alive that you're always afraid that while you weren't reading, the book has gone and changed, has shifted like a river; while you went on living, it went on living too, and like a river moved on and moved away. No one has stepped twice into the same river. But did anyone ever step twice into the same book?

Tsvetaeva, Marina

32.

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

Erasmus, Desiderius

33.

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

Bevan, Aneurin

34.

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

Rohn, Jim

35.

Once we have learned to read, meaning of words can somehow register without consciousness.

Marcel, Anthony

36.

God be thanked for books; they are the voices of the distant and the dead, and make us heirs of the spiritual life of past ages.

Channing, William Ellery

37.

Reading is equivalent to thinking with someone else's head instead of with one's own.

Schopenhauer, Arthur

38.

The books that the world calls immoral are the books that show the world its own shame.

Wilde, Oscar

39.

The reading or non-reading a book will never keep down a single petticoat.

Byron, Lord

40.

Every abridgement of a good book is a fool abridged.

Montaigne, Michel Eyquem De

41.

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

42.

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

Twain, Mark

43.

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

Sandwell, B. K.

44.

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

45.

All my good reading, you might say, was done in the toilet. There are passages in Ulysses which can be read only in the toilet -- if one wants to extract the full flavor of their content.

Miller, Henry

46.

Everything you need for better future and success has already been written. And guess what? All you have to do is go to the library.

Rohn, Jim

47.

What is a diary as a rule? A document useful to the person who keeps it. Dull to the contemporary who reads it and invaluable to the student, centuries afterwards, who treasures it.

Terry, Helen

48.

The failure to read good books both enfeebles the vision and strengthens our most fatal tendency --the belief that the here and now is all there is.

Bloom, Allan

49.

Books are the blessed chloroform of the mind.

Chambers, Robert

50.

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

Hadas, Moses