Motivational Quotes

Books - reading

The mortality of all inanimate things is terrible to me, but that of books most of all.

- Howells, William Dean

Best Quotes about Books - reading

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

Milton, John

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

Books succeed, and lives fail.

Browning, Elizabeth Barrett

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

Lowell, James Russell

The man who does not read books has no advantage over the man that can not read them.

Twain, Mark

Next, in importance to books are their titles.

Davies, Paul

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

Dane, Frank

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

A great book should leave you with many experiences and slightly exhausted at the end. You should live several lives while reading it.

Styron, William

10.

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

11.

A good book is the best of friends, the same today and for ever.

Tupper, Martin

12.

Beware of the person of one book.

Aquinas, St. Thomas

13.

A good book is the very essence of a good man. His virtues survive in it, while the foibles and faults of his actual life are forgotten. All the goodly company of the excellent and great sit around my table, or look down on me from yonder shelves, waiting patiently to answer my questions and enrich me with their wisdom. A precious book is a foretaste of immortality.

Cuyler, Theodore L.

14.

Digressions, incontestably, are the sunshine; they are the life, the soul of reading! Take them out of this book, for instance, --you might as well take the book along with them; --one cold external winter would reign in every page of it; restore them to the writer; --he steps forth like a bridegroom, --bids All-hail; brings in variety, and forbids the appetite to fail.

Sterne, Laurence

15.

In science, read by preference the newest works. In literature, read the oldest. The classics are always modern.

Lytton, Lord Edward

16.

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

17.

Most books, like their authors, are born to die; of only a few books can it be said that death has no dominion over them; they live, and their influence lives forever.

Swartz, J.

18.

I used to walk to school with my nose buried in a book.

Coolio

19.

The mortality of all inanimate things is terrible to me, but that of books most of all.

Howells, William Dean

20.

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

Lee, Spike

21.

The good of a book lies in its being read. A book is made up of signs that speak of other signs, which in their turn speak of things. Without an eye to read them, a book contains signs that produce no concepts; therefore it is dumb.

Eco, Umberto

22.

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

23.

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.

24.

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

Johnson, Samuel

25.

Every abridgement of a good book is a fool abridged.

Montaigne, Michel Eyquem De

26.

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

27.

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.

28.

The books we think we ought to read are poky, dull, and dry; The books that we would like to read we are ashamed to buy; The books that people talk about we never can recall; And the books that people give us, oh, they're the worst of all.

Wells, Carolyn

29.

No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader.

Frost, Robert

30.

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

Mallarme, Stephane

31.

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

32.

A house without books is like a room without windows. No man has a right to bring up his children without surrounding them with books, if he has the means to buy them. It is a wrong to his family. Children learn to read by being in the presence of books. The love of knowledge comes with reading and grows upon it. And the love of knowledge, in a young mind, is almost always a warrant against the inferior excitement of passions and vices.

Mann, Horace

33.

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

Schopenhauer, Arthur

34.

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

Disraeli, Benjamin

35.

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

36.

Read Homer once, and you can read no more. For all books else appear so mean, and so poor. Verse will seem prose; but still persist to read, and Homer will be all the books you need.

Buckingham, Duke of

37.

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

38.

Does there, I wonder, exist a being who has read all, or approximately all, that the person of average culture is supposed to have read, and that not to have read is a social sin? If such a being does exist, surely he is an old, a very old man.

Bennett, Arnold

39.

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

Marcel, Anthony

40.

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

Dawkins, John

41.

The printing press is either the greatest blessing or the greatest curse of modern times, sometimes one forgets which it is.

Barrie, Sir James M.

42.

The last thing one discovers in composing a work is what to put first.

Pascal, Blaise

43.

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

44.

I suggest that the only books that influence us are those for which we are ready, and which have gone a little further down our particular path than we have yet got ourselves.

Forster, Edward M.

45.

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

46.

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

47.

The novel can't compete with cars, the movies, television, and liquor. A guy who's had a good feed and tanked up on good wine gives his old lady a kiss after supper and his day is over. Finished.

Celine, Louis-Ferdinand

48.

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

49.

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

50.

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

Chesterton, Gilbert K.