Motivational Quotes

Books - reading

A bad book is as much of a labor to write as a good one; it comes as sincerely from the author's soul.

- Huxley, Aldous

Best Quotes about Books - reading

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

Hubbard, Elbert

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

Hadas, Moses

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.

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

Read nothing that you do not care to remember, and remember nothing you do not mean to use.

Blackie, Professor

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 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

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

Gibbon, Edward

The pleasure of reading is doubled when one lives with another who shares the same books.

Mansfield, Katherine

10.

There is no such thing as a moral book or an immoral book. Books are well written or badly written. That is all.

Wilde, Oscar

11.

In the dark colony of night, when I consider man's magnificent capacity for malice, madness, folly, envy, rage, and destructiveness, and I wonder whether we shall not end up as breakfast for newts and polyps, I seem to hear the muffled cries of all the words in all the books with covers closed.

Rosten, Leo

12.

No entertainment is so cheap as reading, nor is any pleasure so lasting.

Montagu, Lady Mary Wortley

13.

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

Dawkins, John

14.

Reading a book is like re-writing it for yourself. You bring to a novel, anything you read, all your experience of the world. You bring your history and you read it in your own terms.

Carter, Angela

15.

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

Schopenhauer, Arthur

16.

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

17.

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

Phelps, William Lyon

18.

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

19.

Most books today seemed to have been written overnight from books read the day before.

Chamfort, Sebastien-Roch Nicolas De

20.

Reading the Scriptures is an uplifting experience.

21.

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

Leacock, Stephen B.

22.

Books and marriage go ill together.

Moliere

23.

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

Marcel, Anthony

24.

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

25.

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

26.

The successful Accelerated Reader is able to read larger than normal blocks or bites of the printed page with each eye stop. He has accepted, without reservation, the philosophy that the most important benefit of reading is the gaining of information, ideas, mental picture and entertainment-not the fretting over words. He has come to the realization that words in and of themselves are for the most part insignificant.

Cutler, Wade E.

27.

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

28.

No furniture is so charming as books.

Smith, Sydney

29.

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

Pound, Ezra

30.

Books succeed, and lives fail.

Browning, Elizabeth Barrett

31.

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

32.

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

Lytton, Lord Edward

33.

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

Vaneigem, Raoul

34.

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

35.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

36.

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

37.

A bibliophile of little means is likely to suffer often. Books don't slip from his hands but fly past him through the air, high as birds, high as prices.

Neruda, Pablo

38.

A person who publishes a book appears willfully in public with his pants down.

Millay, Edna St. Vincent

39.

A book that is shut is but a block.

Fuller, Thomas

40.

A book is a mirror: If an ass peers into it, you can't expect an apostle to look out.

Lichtenberg, Georg C.

41.

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

Belloc, Hilaire

42.

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

43.

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

44.

The books one has written in the past have two surprises in store: one couldn't write them again, and wouldn't want to.

Rostand, Jean

45.

There is creative reading as well as creative writing.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

46.

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

Howells, William Dean

47.

Hypocrite reader -- my fellow -- my brother!

Baudelaire, Charles

48.

Learning to read has been reduced to a process of mastering a series of narrow, specific, hierarchical skills. Where armed-forces recruits learn the components of a rifle or the intricacies of close order drill by the numbers, recruits to reading learn its mechanics sound by sound and word by word.

Gross, Jacquelyn

49.

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

50.

A book might be written on the injustice of the just.

Hope, Anthony