Motivational Quotes

Books - reading

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

Best Quotes about Books - reading

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

Locke, John

Reading the Scriptures is an uplifting experience.

A big leather-bound volume makes an ideal razor strap. A thin book is useful to stick under a table with a broken caster to steady it. A large, flat atlas can be used to cover a window with a broken pane. And a thick, old-fashioned heavy book with a clasp is the finest thing in the world to throw at a noisy cat.

Twain, Mark

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.

There are people who read too much: bibliobibuli. I know some who are constantly drunk on books, as other men are drunk on whiskey or religion. They wander through this most diverting and stimulating of worlds in a haze, seeing nothing and hearing nothing.

Mencken, H. L.

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

The Brahmins say that in their books there are many predictions of times in which it will rain. But press those books as strongly as you can, you can not get out of them a drop of water. So you can not get out of all the books that contain the best precepts the smallest good deed.

Tolstoy, Count Leo

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

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

10.

Except a living man there is nothing more wonderful than a book! a message to us from the dead -- from human souls we never saw, who lived, perhaps, thousands of miles away. And yet these, in those little sheets of paper, speak to us, arouse us, terrify us, teach us, comfort us, open their hearts to us as brothers.

Kingsley, Charles

11.

No man understands a deep book until he has seen and lived at least part of its contents.

Pound, Ezra

12.

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

13.

A novel is never anything, but a philosophy put into images.

Camus, Albert

14.

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

Rohn, Jim

15.

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

16.

We are too civil to books. For a few golden sentences we will turn over and actually read a volume of four or five hundred pages.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

17.

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

18.

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

Holmes, Oliver Wendell

19.

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

Ruskin, John

20.

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

Disraeli, Benjamin

21.

You can either read something many times in order to be assured that you got it all, or else you can define your purpose and use techniques which will assure that you have met it and gotten what you need.

Kump, Peter

22.

Beware you be not swallowed up in books! An ounce of love is worth a pound of knowledge.

Wesley, John

23.

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

24.

My early and invincible love of reading I would not exchange for all the riches of India.

Gibbon, Edward

25.

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

Hood, Thomas

26.

Footnotes are the finer-suckered surfaces that allow testicular paragraphs to hold fast to the wider reality of the library.

Baker, Nicholson

27.

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

28.

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

29.

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.

30.

No one can read with profit that which he cannot learn to read with pleasure.

Porter, Noah

31.

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

32.

Books are those faithful mirrors that reflect to our mind the minds of sages and heroes.

Gibbon, Edward

33.

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

34.

He that loves a book will never want a faithful friend, a wholesome counselor, a cheerful companion, an effectual comforter. By study, by reading, by thinking, one may innocently divert and pleasantly entertain himself, as in all weathers, as in all fortunes.

Barrow

35.

There is creative reading as well as creative writing.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

36.

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

37.

No furniture is so charming as books.

Smith, Sydney

38.

One half who graduate from college never read another book.

True, Herbert

39.

The greatest gift is the passion for reading. It is cheap, it consoles, it distracts, it excites, it gives you knowledge of the world and experience of a wide kind. It is a moral illumination.

Hardwick, Elizabeth

40.

To learn to read is to light a fire; every syllable that is spelled out is a spark.

Hugo, Victor

41.

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

42.

Today a reader, tomorrow a leader.

Fusselman, W.

43.

When a book raises your spirit, and inspires you with noble and manly thoughts, seek for no other test of its excellence. It is good, and made by a good workman.

Bruyere, Jean De La

44.

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

Forster, Edward M.

45.

A bad book is the worse that it cannot repent. It has not been the devil's policy to keep the masses of mankind in ignorance; but finding that they will read, he is doing all in his power to poison their books.

Kirk, E.N.

46.

I divide all readers into two classes: those who read to remember and those who read to forget.

Phelps, William Lyon

47.

The age of the book is almost gone.

Steiner, George

48.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

49.

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

50.

A book may be compared to your neighbor: if it be good, it cannot last too long; if bad, you cannot get rid of it too early.

Brooke, Rupert