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

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

Fuller, Margaret

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

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

Sandwell, B. K.

I love to lose myself in other men's minds. When I am not walking, I am reading. I cannot sit and think; books think for me.

Lamb, Charles

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

There is no robber worse than a bad book.

Proverb, Italian

Read good, big important things.

Noonan, Peggy

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 oldest books are still only just out to those who have not read them.

Butler, Samuel

10.

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

Hood, Thomas

11.

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

12.

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

Morely, John

13.

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.

14.

We should be as careful of the books we read, as of the company we keep. The dead very often have more power than the living.

Edwards, Tryon

15.

I always begin at the left with the opening word of the sentence and read toward the right and I recommend this method.

Thurber, James

16.

A novel is a mirror carried along a main road.

Stendhal, Henri B.

17.

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

Mcluhan, Marshall

18.

A good book, in the language of the book-sellers, is a salable one; in that of the curious, a scarce one; in that of men of sense, a useful and instructive one.

Chambers, Oswald

19.

One sheds one's sicknesses in books -- repeats and presents again one's emotions, to be master of them.

Lawrence, D. H.

20.

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.

21.

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

Millay, Edna St. Vincent

22.

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

Channing, William Ellery

23.

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

24.

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

25.

When you have mastered numbers, you will in fact no longer be reading numbers, any more than you read words when reading books You will be reading meanings.

Geneen, Harold S.

26.

The constant habit of perusing devout books is so indispensable, that it has been termed the oil of the lamp of prayer. Too much reading, however, and too little meditation, may produce the effect of a lamp inverted; which is extinguished by the very excess of that ailment, whose property is to feed it.

More, Hannah

27.

Today a reader, tomorrow a leader.

Fusselman, W.

28.

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

29.

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

Schopenhauer, Arthur

30.

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

31.

A wicked book cannot repent.

Proverb

32.

Hemingway, Ernest

33.

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

Maugham, W. Somerset

34.

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

35.

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

36.

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

37.

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

Luther, Martin

38.

Reading the Scriptures is an uplifting experience.

39.

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

Maclennan, Hugh

40.

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

Harington, John

41.

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

Lichtenberg, Georg C.

42.

The newest books are those that never grow old.

Jackson, George Holbrook

43.

'Tis the good reader that makes the good book; in every book he finds passages which seem to be confidences or sides hidden from all else and unmistakably meant for his ear; the profit of books is according to the sensibility of the reader; the profound thought or passion sleeps as in a mine, until it is discovered by an equal mind and heart.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

44.

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

Wilde, Oscar

45.

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.

46.

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

47.

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

48.

Books and marriage go ill together.

Moliere

49.

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