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

A book that is shut is but a block.

Fuller, Thomas

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

Rohn, Jim

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.

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

Hadas, Moses

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

No furniture is so charming as books.

Smith, Sydney

I would sooner read a timetable or a catalog than nothing at all.

Maugham, W. Somerset

A wicked book cannot repent.

Proverb

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

10.

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

Howells, William Dean

11.

To use books rightly, is to go to them for help; to appeal to them when our own knowledge and power fail; to be led by them into wider sight and purer conception than our own, and to receive from them the united sentence of the judges and councils of all time, against our solitary and unstable opinions.

Ruskin, John

12.

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

13.

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

Maclennan, Hugh

14.

Today a reader, tomorrow a leader.

Fusselman, W.

15.

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

Camus, Albert

16.

'Tis pleasant, sure, to see one's name in print; A book's a book, although there's nothing in it.

Byron, Lord

17.

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.

18.

Everywhere I have sought rest and not found it, except sitting in a corner by myself with a little book.

Kempis, Thomas

19.

My books are water; those of the great geniuses are wine -- everybody drinks water.

Twain, Mark

20.

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

21.

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

Lee, Spike

22.

This is not a book. This is libel, slander, defamation of character. This is not a book, in the ordinary sense of the word. No, this is a prolonged insult, a gob of spit in the face of Art, a kick in the pants to God, Man, Destiny, Time, Love, Beauty... what you will. I am going to sing for you, a little off key perhaps, but I will sing.

Miller, Henry

23.

Books are the best of things if well used; if abused, among the worst. They are good for nothing but to inspire. I had better never see a book than be warped by its attraction clean out of my own orbit, and made a satellite instead of a system.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

24.

A real book is not one that we read, but one that reads us.

Auden, W. H.

25.

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

26.

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

Lytton, Lord Edward

27.

Education... has produced a vast population able to read but unable to distinguish what is worth reading, an easy prey to sensations and cheap appeals.

Trevelyan, G. M.

28.

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.

29.

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

30.

To buy books would be a good thing if we also could buy the time to read them.

Schopenhauer, Arthur

31.

The oldest books are still only just out to those who have not read them.

Butler, Samuel

32.

Reading is to the mind what exercise is to the body. It is wholesome and bracing for the mind to have its faculties kept on the stretch.

Steele, Sir Richard

33.

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

34.

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

35.

Books to judicious compilers, are useful; to particular arts and professions, they are absolutely necessary; to men of real science, they are tools: but more are tools to them.

Johnson

36.

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.

37.

Books are not men and yet they stay alive.

Benet, Stephen Vincent

38.

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

Marcel, Anthony

39.

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

Twain, Mark

40.

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

41.

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

Morely, John

42.

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

Mansfield, Katherine

43.

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

Phelps, William Lyon

44.

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

45.

Begin to read a book that will help you move toward your dream.

Brown, Les

46.

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

47.

A book worth reading is worth buying.

Ruskin, John

48.

Who ever converses among old books will be hard to please among the new.

Temple, Sir William

49.

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

50.

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