Motivational Quotes

Books - reading

The newest books are those that never grow old.

- Jackson, George Holbrook

Best Quotes about Books - reading

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

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

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.

If a secret history of books could be written, and the author's private thoughts and meanings noted down alongside of his story, how many insipid volumes would become interesting, and dull tales excite the reader!

Thackeray, William M.

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

Ruskin, John

Readers are plentiful: thinkers are rare.

Martineau, Harriet

Somewhere, everywhere, now hidden, now apparent in what ever is written down, is the form of a human being. If we seek to know him, are we idly occupied?

Woolf, Virginia

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

Chamfort, Sebastien-Roch Nicolas De

What is reading, but silent conversation.

Landor, Walter Savage

10.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

11.

One sheds one's sicknesses in books -- repeats and presents again one's emotions, to be master of them.

Lawrence, D. H.

12.

The best effect of any book, is that it excites the reader to self-activity.

Carlyle, 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.

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

15.

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

16.

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

17.

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

Pound, Ezra

18.

Some of the most famous books are the least worth reading. Their fame was due to their having done something that needed to be doing in their day. The work is done and the virtue of the book has expired.

Morely, John

19.

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

20.

The more sins you confess, the more books you will sell.

Proverb, American

21.

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

22.

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

Temple, Sir William

23.

What we become depends on what we read after all the professors have finished with us. The greatest university of all is the collection of books.

Carlyle, Thomas

24.

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

Coolio

25.

Of all the ways of acquiring books, writing them oneself is regarded as the most praiseworthy method. Writers are really people who write books not because they are poor, but because they are dissatisfied with the books which they could buy but do not like.

Benjamin, Walter

26.

Some books leave us free and some books make us free.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

27.

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

28.

No matter how busy you may think you are, you must find time for reading, or surrender yourself to self-chosen ignorance.

Townsend, Atwood H.

29.

He has only half learned the art of reading who has not added to it the more refined art of skipping and skimming.

Balfour, Arthur James

30.

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

Lytton, Lord Edward

31.

Old books that have ceased to be of service should no more be abandoned than should old friends who have ceased to give pleasure.

Worsthorne, Sir Peregrine

32.

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

Luther, Martin

33.

Prerequisite for rereadability in books: that they be forgettable.

Rostand, Jean

34.

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

35.

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.

36.

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

Chesterton, Gilbert K.

37.

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.

38.

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

Baker, Nicholson

39.

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

Dawkins, John

40.

The reading or non-reading a book will never keep down a single petticoat.

Byron, Lord

41.

Everything in this book may be wrong. [The Savior's Manual]

Bach, Richard

42.

Every abridgement of a good book is a fool abridged.

Montaigne, Michel Eyquem De

43.

The world may be full of fourth-rate writers but it's also full of fourth-rate readers.

Barstow, Stan

44.

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

45.

People are much more willing to lend you books than bookcases.

Twain, Mark

46.

The power of a text is different when it is read from when it is copied out. Only the copied text thus commands the soul of him who is occupied with it, whereas the mere reader never discovers the new aspects of his inner self that are opened by the text, that road cut through the interior jungle forever closing behind it: because the reader follows the movement of his mind in the free flight of day-dreaming, whereas the copier submits it to command.

Benjamin, Walter

47.

Only a generation of readers will span a generation of writers.

Spielberg, Steven

48.

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

49.

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

Phillips, Wendell

50.

A good title is the title of a successful book.