Motivational Quotes

Books - reading

All good books are alike in that they are truer than if they had really happened and after you are finished reading one you will feel that all that happened to you and afterwards it all belongs to you; the good and the bad, the ecstasy, the remorse, and sorrow, the people and the places and how the weather was.

- Hemingway, Ernest

Best Quotes about Books - reading

The book salesman should be honored because he brings to our attention, as a rule, the very books we need most and neglect most.

Crane, Frank

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

Maclennan, Hugh

A novel is a mirror carried along a main road.

Stendhal, Henri B.

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

Chesterton, Gilbert K.

Ideally a book would have no order to it, and the reader would have to discover his own.

Vaneigem, Raoul

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

A book is a mirror: If an ass peers into it, you can't expect an apostle to look out.

Lichtenberg, Georg C.

As writers become more numerous, it is natural for readers to become more indolent; whence must necessarily arise a desire of attaining knowledge with the greatest possible ease.

Goldsmith, Oliver

Happy is he who has laid up in his youth, and held fast in all fortune, a genuine and passionate love for reading.

Choate, Rufus

10.

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

Shaw, George Bernard

11.

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

12.

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

Holmes, Oliver Wendell

13.

I feel like I'm drowning. Every night, I'm carrying home loads of things to read but I'm too exhausted. I keep clipping things and Xeroxing them and planning to read them eventually, but I just end up throwing it all away and feeling guilty.

Levine, Ghita

14.

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

15.

One always tends to overpraise a long book, because one has got through it.

Forster, Edward M.

16.

A dose of poison can do its work but once. A bad book can go on poisoning minds for generations.

Murray, William

17.

The multitude of books is a great evil. There is no limit to this fever for writing.

Luther, Martin

18.

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

19.

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

Asimov, Isaac

20.

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

21.

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

Byron, Lord

22.

I am a part of everything that I have read.

Kieran, John

23.

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

Bach, Richard

24.

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

25.

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

Barstow, Stan

26.

Who ever converses among old books will be hard to please among the new.

Temple, Sir William

27.

Today a reader, tomorrow a leader.

Fusselman, W.

28.

The tools I need for my work are paper, tobacco, food, and a little whiskey.

Faulkner, William

29.

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

30.

Everything in the world exists to end up in a book.

Mallarme, Stephane

31.

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

Harington, John

32.

Until I feared I would lose it, I never loved to read. One does not love breathing.

Lee, Harper

33.

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

Byron, Lord

34.

A person of mature years and ripe development, who is expecting nothing from literature but the corroboration and renewal of past ideas, may find satisfaction in a lucidity so complete as to occasion no imaginative excitement, but young and ambitious students are not content with it. They seek the excitement because they are capable of the growth that it accompanies.

Cooley, Charles Horton

35.

Books succeed, and lives fail.

Browning, Elizabeth Barrett

36.

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

Ruskin, John

37.

Books are divided into two classes, the books of the hour and the books of all time.

Ruskin, John

38.

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

Johnson, Samuel

39.

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

40.

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.

41.

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

42.

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.

43.

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

44.

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

45.

Hemingway, Ernest

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.

The age of the book is almost gone.

Steiner, George

48.

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

Dawkins, John

49.

Thy books should, like thy friends, not many be, yet such wherein men may thy judgment see.

Wycherley, William

50.

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