Motivational Quotes

Books - reading

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

Best Quotes about Books - reading

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

Hypocrite reader -- my fellow -- my brother!

Baudelaire, Charles

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

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

Dawkins, John

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

Hadas, Moses

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

When I am dead, I hope it may be said: His sins were scarlet, but his books were read.

Belloc, Hilaire

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

Bevan, Aneurin

Book love... is your pass to the greatest, the purest, and the most perfect pleasure that God has prepared for His creatures.

Trollope, Anthony

10.

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

Marcel, Anthony

11.

I can't bear art that you can walk round and admire. A book should be either a bandit or a rebel or a man in the crowd.

Lawrence, D. H.

12.

Readers are plentiful: thinkers are rare.

Martineau, Harriet

13.

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

Murray, William

14.

If I had my way books would not be written in English, but in an exceedingly difficult secret language that only skilled professional readers and story-tellers could interpret. Then people like you would have to go to public halls and pay good prices to hear the professionals decode and read the books aloud for you. This plan would have the advantage of scaring off all amateur authors, retired politicians, country doctors and I-Married-a-Midget writers who would not have the patience to learn the secret language.

Davies, Robertson

15.

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

16.

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

Sandwell, B. K.

17.

Books, books, books had found the secret of a garret-room piled high with cases in my father's name; Piled high, packed large, --where, creeping in and out among the giant fossils of my past, like some small nimble mouse between the ribs of a mastodon, I nibbled here and there at this or that box, pulling through the gap, in heats of terror, haste, victorious joy, the first book first. And how I felt it beat under my pillow, in the morning's dark. An hour before the sun would let me read! My books!

Browning, Elizabeth Barrett

18.

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

Shaw, George Bernard

19.

A multitude of books distracts the mind.

Socrates

20.

Books are not men and yet they stay alive.

Benet, Stephen Vincent

21.

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

Maclennan, Hugh

22.

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

23.

With one day's reading a man may have the key in his hands.

Pound, Ezra

24.

The classics are only primitive literature. They belong to the same class as primitive machinery and primitive music and primitive medicine.

Leacock, Stephen B.

25.

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

Disraeli, Benjamin

26.

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

Faulkner, William

27.

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

28.

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

29.

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

30.

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

31.

Who kills a man kills a reasonable creature, God's image, but thee who destroys a good book, kills reason itself.

Milton, John

32.

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

33.

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

34.

A book that is shut is but a block.

Fuller, Thomas

35.

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

36.

Books are lighthouses erected in the great sea of time.

Whipple, Edwin P.

37.

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

Lowell, James Russell

38.

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

Lee, Harper

39.

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.

40.

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

41.

There is no robber worse than a bad book.

Proverb, Italian

42.

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

43.

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

Twain, Mark

44.

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

45.

The reason a writer writes a book is to forget a book and the reason a reader reads one is to remember it.

Wolfe, Thomas

46.

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

Luther, Martin

47.

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

Morely, John

48.

The books that everybody admires are those that nobody reads.

France, Anatole

49.

Tradition is but a meteor, which, if it once falls, cannot be rekindled. Memory, once interrupted, is not to be recalled. But written learning is a fixed luminary, which, after the cloud that had hidden it has passed away, is again bright in its proper station. So books are faithful repositories, which may be awhile neglected or forgotten, but when opened again, will again impart instruction.

Johnson

50.

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

Chappell, Warren