Motivational Quotes

Books - reading

The newest books are those that never grow old.

- Jackson, George Holbrook

Best Quotes about Books - reading

There are worse crimes than burning books. One of them is not reading them.

Brodsky, Joseph

The failure to read good books both enfeebles the vision and strengthens our most fatal tendency --the belief that the here and now is all there is.

Bloom, Allan

There is a set of religious, or rather moral, writings which teach that virtue is the certain road to happiness, and vice to misery in this world. A very wholesome and comfortable doctrine, and to which we have but one objection, namely, that it is not true.

Fielding, Henry

Do we write books so that they shall merely be read? Don't we also write them for employment in the household? For one that is read from start to finish, thousands are leafed through, other thousands lie motionless, others are jammed against mouseholes, thrown at rats, others are stood on, sat on, drummed on, have gingerbread baked on them or are used to light pipes.

Lichtenberg, Georg C.

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

Luther, Martin

Hypocrite reader -- my fellow -- my brother!

Baudelaire, Charles

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

A person of mature years and ripe development, who is expecting nothing from literature but the corroboration and renewal of past ideas, may find satisfaction in a lucidity so complete as to occasion no imaginative excitement, but young and ambitious students are not content with it. They seek the excitement because they are capable of the growth that it accompanies.

Cooley, Charles Horton

A good title is the title of a successful book.

Chandler, Raymond

10.

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

Morely, John

11.

After all, the world is not a stage -- not to me: nor a theatre: nor a show-house of any sort. And art, especially novels, are not little theatres where the reader sits aloft and watches... and sighs, commiserates, condones and smiles. That's what you want a book to be: because it leaves you so safe and superior, with your two-dollar ticket to the show. And that's what my books are not and never will be. Whoever reads me will be in the thick of the scrimmage, and if he doesn't like it -- if he wants a safe seat in the audience -- let him read someone else.

Lawrence, D. H.

12.

The books that everybody admires are those that nobody reads.

France, Anatole

13.

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

14.

When the book comes out it may hurt you -- but in order for me to do it, it had to hurt me first. I can only tell you about yourself as much as I can face about myself.

Baldwin, James

15.

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

16.

What is the most precious, the most exciting smell awaiting you in the house when you return to it after a dozen years or so? The smell of roses, you think? No, moldering books.

Sinyavsky, Andre

17.

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

Proverb, American

18.

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

Murray, William

19.

A multitude of books distracts the mind.

Socrates

20.

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

Mencken, H. L.

21.

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.

22.

A house is not a home unless it contains food and fire for the mind as well as the body.

Fuller, Margaret

23.

There is creative reading as well as creative writing.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

24.

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

Spielberg, Steven

25.

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

26.

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

27.

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

Mccay, James T.

28.

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

Byron, Lord

29.

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

Chappell, Warren

30.

Digressions, incontestably, are the sunshine; they are the life, the soul of reading! Take them out of this book, for instance, --you might as well take the book along with them; --one cold external winter would reign in every page of it; restore them to the writer; --he steps forth like a bridegroom, --bids All-hail; brings in variety, and forbids the appetite to fail.

Sterne, Laurence

31.

Happy is he who has laid up in his youth, and held fast in all fortune, a genuine and passionate love for reading.

Choate, Rufus

32.

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

33.

In the case of good books, the point is not how many of them you can get through, but rather how many can get through to you.

Adler, Mortimer J.

34.

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

Rohn, Jim

35.

A book that is shut is but a block.

Fuller, Thomas

36.

There are very many people who read simply to prevent themselves from thinking.

Lichtenberg, Georg C.

37.

A library is thought in cold storage.

Samuel, Herbert

38.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

39.

Readers are less and less seen as mere non-writers, the subhuman other or flawed derivative of the author; the lack of a pen is no longer a shameful mark of secondary status but a positively enabling space, just as within every writer can be seen to lurk, as a repressed but contaminating antithesis, a reader.

Eagleton, Terry

40.

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

Marcel, Anthony

41.

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

Gibbon, Edward

42.

What is a diary as a rule? A document useful to the person who keeps it. Dull to the contemporary who reads it and invaluable to the student, centuries afterwards, who treasures it.

Terry, Helen

43.

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

Camus, Albert

44.

The most foolish kind of a book is a kind of leaky boat on the sea of wisdom; some of the wisdom will get in anyhow.

Holmes, Oliver Wendell

45.

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

46.

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

Schopenhauer, Arthur

47.

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

48.

How can you dare teach a man to read until you've taught him everything else first?

Shaw, George Bernard

49.

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

Ruskin, John

50.

Every man is a volume if you know how to read him.

Channing, William Ellery