Motivational Quotes

Books - reading

The good parts of a book may be only something a writer is lucky enough to overhear or it may be the wreck of his whole damn life --and one is as good as the other.

- Hemingway, Ernest

Best Quotes about Books - reading

Books to judicious compilers, are useful; to particular arts and professions, they are absolutely necessary; to men of real science, they are tools: but more are tools to them.

Johnson

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

Butler, Samuel

There is a set of religious, or rather moral, writings which teach that virtue is the certain road to happiness, and vice to misery in this world. A very wholesome and comfortable doctrine, and to which we have but one objection, namely, that it is not true.

Fielding, Henry

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

The flood of print has turned reading into a process of gulping rather than savoring

Chappell, Warren

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

Lee, Spike

Without books the development of civilization would have been impossible. They are the engines of change, windows on the world, Lighthouses as the poet said erected in the sea of time. They are companions, teachers, magicians, bankers of the treasures of the mind, Books are humanity in print.

Schopenhauer, Arthur

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

Harington, John

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

Asimov, Isaac

10.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

11.

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

12.

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

13.

The books we read should be chosen with great care, that they may be, as an Egyptian king wrote over his library, The medicines of the soul.

Hood, Paxton

14.

There are very many people who read simply to prevent themselves from thinking.

Lichtenberg, Georg C.

15.

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.

16.

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

Mencken, H. L.

17.

Books are standing counselors and preachers, always at hand, and always disinterested; having this advantage over oral instructors, that they are ready to repeat their lesson as often as we please.

Chambers, Oswald

18.

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

19.

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

Luther, Martin

20.

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

Channing, William Ellery

21.

A vacuum of ideas affects people differently than a vacuum of air, otherwise readers of books would be constantly collapsing.

Lichtenberg, Georg C.

22.

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

Murray, William

23.

The books that everybody admires are those that nobody reads.

France, Anatole

24.

The great American novel has not only already been written, it has already been rejected.

Dane, Frank

25.

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

Schopenhauer, Arthur

26.

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

Temple, Sir William

27.

Those who do not read are no better off than those who cannot read.

28.

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

Vaneigem, Raoul

29.

The things I want to know are in books; my best friend is the man who'll get me a book I ain't read.

Lincoln, Abraham

30.

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

31.

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

32.

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

33.

Next, in importance to books are their titles.

Davies, Paul

34.

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

35.

Books are not men and yet they stay alive.

Benet, Stephen Vincent

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.

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

Holmes, Oliver Wendell

38.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

39.

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

Morely, John

40.

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

Adler, Mortimer J.

41.

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

42.

Any book that helps a child to form a habit of reading, to make reading one of his deep and continuing needs, is good for him.

McKenna, Richard

43.

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

Dawkins, John

44.

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

45.

All the known world, excepting only savage nations, is governed by books.

Voltaire

46.

A multitude of books distracts the mind.

Socrates

47.

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

Maugham, W. Somerset

48.

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

49.

The reason that fiction is more interesting than any other form of literature, to those who really like to study people, is that in fiction the author can really tell the truth without humiliating himself.

Roosevelt, Eleanor

50.

A book is a part of life, a manifestation of life, just as much as a tree or a horse or a star. It obeys its own rhythms, its own laws, whether it be a novel, a play, or a diary. The deep, hidden rhythm of life is always there -- that of the pulse, the heart beat.

Miller, Henry