Motivational Quotes

Books - reading

The newest books are those that never grow old.

- Jackson, George Holbrook

Best Quotes about Books - reading

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.

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

Sandwell, B. K.

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

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

Twain, Mark

The newest books are those that never grow old.

Jackson, George Holbrook

Next, in importance to books are their titles.

Davies, Paul

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

How many a man has dated a new era in his life from the reading of a book! The book exists for us, perchance, that will explain our miracles and reveal new ones. The at present unutterable things we may find somewhere uttered.

Thoreau, Henry David

There are two kinds of books. Those that no one reads and those that no one ought to read.

Mencken, H. L.

10.

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.

11.

Surviving and thriving as a professional today demands two new approaches to the written word. First, it requires a new approach to orchestrating information, by skillfully choosing what to read and what to ignore. Second, it requires a new approach to integrating information, by reading faster and with greater comprehension.

Calano, Jimmy

12.

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

13.

No one can read with profit that which he cannot learn to read with pleasure.

Porter, Noah

14.

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

Ruskin, John

15.

A good title is the title of a successful book.

Chandler, Raymond

16.

What is reading, but silent conversation.

Landor, Walter Savage

17.

A book is a part of life, a manifestation of life, just as much as a tree or a horse or a star. It obeys its own rhythms, its own laws, whether it be a novel, a play, or a diary. The deep, hidden rhythm of life is always there -- that of the pulse, the heart beat.

Miller, Henry

18.

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.

19.

Books succeed, and lives fail.

Browning, Elizabeth Barrett

20.

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

Chesterton, Gilbert K.

21.

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

22.

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

Maugham, W. Somerset

23.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

24.

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

Carey, Joyce

25.

With one day's reading a man may have the key in his hands.

Pound, Ezra

26.

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

Blackie, Professor

27.

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

28.

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

Carlyle, Thomas

29.

The Brahmins say that in their books there are many predictions of times in which it will rain. But press those books as strongly as you can, you can not get out of them a drop of water. So you can not get out of all the books that contain the best precepts the smallest good deed.

Tolstoy, Count Leo

30.

Books are the blessed chloroform of the mind.

Chambers, Robert

31.

Every abridgement of a good book is a fool abridged.

Montaigne, Michel Eyquem De

32.

The books one reads in childhood, and perhaps most of all the bad and good bad books, create in one's mind a sort of false map of the world, a series of fabulous countries into which one can retreat at odd moments throughout the rest of life, and which in some cases can survive a visit to the real countries which they are supposed to represent.

Orwell, George

33.

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.

34.

God be thanked for books; they are the voices of the distant and the dead, and make us heirs of the spiritual life of past ages.

Channing, William Ellery

35.

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

36.

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

37.

A dose of poison can do its work but once. A bad book can go on poisoning minds for generations.

Murray, William

38.

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

39.

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

Lee, Harper

40.

Americans will listen, but they do not care to read. War and Peace must wait for the leisure of retirement, which never really comes: meanwhile it helps to furnish the living room. Blockbusting fiction is bought as furniture. Unread, it maintains its value. Read, it looks like money wasted. Cunningly, Americans know that books contain a person, and they want the person, not the book.

Burgess, Anthony

41.

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

Disraeli, Benjamin

42.

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

Phelps, William Lyon

43.

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

44.

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

Gibbon, Edward

45.

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

Leacock, Stephen B.

46.

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

Johnson, Samuel

47.

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

Twain, Mark

48.

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

49.

Fiction reveals truth that reality obscures.

West, Jessamyn

50.

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

Millay, Edna St. Vincent