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

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

I am a part of everything that I have read.

Kieran, John

A person who publishes a book appears willfully in public with his pants down.

Millay, Edna St. Vincent

You've really got to start hitting the books because it's no joke out here.

Lee, Spike

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

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

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

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

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

Maclennan, Hugh

10.

Books, like friends, should be few and well chosen. Like friends, too, we should return to them again and again for, like true friends, they will never fail us -- never cease to instruct -- never cloy.

Colton, Charles Caleb

11.

From the moment I picked your book up until I laid it down I was convulsed with laughter. Some day I intend reading it.

Marx, Groucho

12.

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.

13.

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

Morely, John

14.

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

Secondat, Charles de

15.

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

16.

Read as you taste fruit or savor wine, or enjoy friendship, love or life.

Jackson, Holbrook

17.

Books succeed, and lives fail.

Browning, Elizabeth Barrett

18.

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

Coolio

19.

One half who graduate from college never read another book.

True, Herbert

20.

Every abridgement of a good book is a fool abridged.

Montaigne, Michel Eyquem De

21.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

22.

Don't just read the easy stuff. You may be entertained by it, but you will never grow from it.

Rohn, Jim

23.

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

24.

Some books leave us free and some books make us free.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

25.

Most books, like their authors, are born to die; of only a few books can it be said that death has no dominion over them; they live, and their influence lives forever.

Swartz, J.

26.

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

27.

A wicked book cannot repent.

Proverb

28.

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

29.

A bibliophile of little means is likely to suffer often. Books don't slip from his hands but fly past him through the air, high as birds, high as prices.

Neruda, Pablo

30.

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

31.

He had read much, if one considers his long life; but his contemplation was much more than his reading. He was wont to say that if he had read as much as other men he should have known no more than other men.

Aubrey, John

32.

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

Critchfield, Jim

33.

The reading of all good books is like a conversation with all the finest men of past centuries.

Descartes, Rene

34.

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.

35.

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

Locke, John

36.

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

37.

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

38.

I would sooner read a timetable or a catalog than nothing at all.

Maugham, W. Somerset

39.

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

Lowell, James Russell

40.

Fiction reveals truth that reality obscures.

West, Jessamyn

41.

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

42.

This is not a book. This is libel, slander, defamation of character. This is not a book, in the ordinary sense of the word. No, this is a prolonged insult, a gob of spit in the face of Art, a kick in the pants to God, Man, Destiny, Time, Love, Beauty... what you will. I am going to sing for you, a little off key perhaps, but I will sing.

Miller, Henry

43.

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

Hadas, Moses

44.

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

45.

There are two kinds of books. Those that no one reads and those that no one ought to read.

Mencken, H. L.

46.

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

Fuller, Margaret

47.

There is creative reading as well as creative writing.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

48.

Somewhere, everywhere, now hidden, now apparent in what ever is written down, is the form of a human being. If we seek to know him, are we idly occupied?

Woolf, Virginia

49.

Today a reader, tomorrow a leader.

Fusselman, W.

50.

How can you dare teach a man to read until you've taught him everything else first?

Shaw, George Bernard