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

All the best stories in the world are but one story in reality -- the story of escape. It is the only thing which interests us all and at all times, how to escape.

Benson, Arthur Christopher

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

Pascal, Blaise

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

You will, I am sure, agree with me that... if page 534 only finds us in the second chapter, the length of the first one must have been really intolerable.

Doyle, Sir Arthur Conan

Much reading is an oppression of the mind, and extinguishes the natural candle, which is the reason of so many senseless scholars in the world.

Penn, William

What is important is not to be able to read rapidly, but to be able to decide what not to read.

Mccay, James T.

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

Locke, John

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.

Books are divided into two classes, the books of the hour and the books of all time.

Ruskin, John

10.

Fiction reveals truth that reality obscures.

West, Jessamyn

11.

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.

12.

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

13.

To feel most beautifully alive means to be reading something beautiful, ready always to apprehend in the flow of language the sudden flash of poetry.

Bachelard, Gaston

14.

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

Johnson, Samuel

15.

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

16.

This will never be a civilized country until we expend more money for books than we do for chewing gum.

Hubbard, Elbert

17.

If a book comes from the heart it will contrive to reach other hearts. All art and author craft are of small account to that.

Carlyle, Thomas

18.

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

Belloc, Hilaire

19.

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

Gibbon, Edward

20.

A novel is a mirror carried along a main road.

Stendhal, Henri B.

21.

Here, my dear Lucy, hide these books. Quick, quick! Fling Peregrine Pickle under the toilette --throw Roderick Random into the closet --put The Innocent Adultery into The Whole Duty of Man; thrust Lord Aimworth under the sofa! cram Ovid behind the bolster; there --put The Man of Feeling into your pocket. Now for them.

Sheridan, Richard Brinsley

22.

A novel points out that the world consists entirely of exceptions.

Carey, Joyce

23.

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.

24.

A good title is the title of a successful book.

Chandler, Raymond

25.

To sit alone in the lamplight with a book spread out before you hold intimate converse with men of unseen generations -- such is pleasure beyond compare.

Kenko, Yoshida

26.

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

Lee, Spike

27.

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

28.

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

29.

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

Chappell, Warren

30.

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

Coolio

31.

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

Hood, Thomas

32.

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

Bevan, Aneurin

33.

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

34.

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

Sandwell, B. K.

35.

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

Lee, Harper

36.

No story is the same to us after a lapse of time; or rather we who read it are no longer the same interpreters.

Eliot, George

37.

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.

38.

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

39.

The Bible remained for me a book of books, still divine -- but divine in the sense that all great books are divine which teach men how to live righteously.

Keith, Sir Arthur

40.

Then I though of reading -- the nice and subtle happiness of reading ... this joy not dulled by age, this polite and unpunishable vice, this selfish, serene, lifelong intoxication.

Smith, Logan Pearsall

41.

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

42.

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.

43.

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

44.

What gunpowder did for war the printing press has done for the mind.

Phillips, Wendell

45.

Books succeed, and lives fail.

Browning, Elizabeth Barrett

46.

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

Luther, Martin

47.

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

48.

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

49.

Miss a meal if you have to, but don't miss a book.

Rohn, Jim

50.

Books are the blessed chloroform of the mind.

Chambers, Robert