Motivational Quotes

Books - reading

Read as you taste fruit or savor wine, or enjoy friendship, love or life.

- Jackson, Holbrook

Best Quotes about Books - reading

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

Leacock, Stephen B.

The books that the world calls immoral are the books that show the world its own shame.

Wilde, Oscar

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

Lichtenberg, Georg C.

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

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

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

Chesterton, Gilbert K.

Books succeed, and lives fail.

Browning, Elizabeth Barrett

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

Coolio

The book salesman should be honored because he brings to our attention, as a rule, the very books we need most and neglect most.

Crane, Frank

10.

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

Carey, Joyce

11.

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

12.

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

13.

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

14.

A book may be compared to your neighbor: if it be good, it cannot last too long; if bad, you cannot get rid of it too early.

Brooke, Rupert

15.

I've never know any trouble than an hour's reading didn't assuage.

Secondat, Charles de

16.

When you reread a classic, you do not see more in the book than you did before; you see more in you than there was before.

Fadiman, Clifton

17.

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

Phelps, William Lyon

18.

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.

19.

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

Luther, Martin

20.

You are wise, witty and wonderful, but you spend too much time reading this sort of stuff.

Critchfield, Jim

21.

I always begin at the left with the opening word of the sentence and read toward the right and I recommend this method.

Thurber, James

22.

Read as you taste fruit or savor wine, or enjoy friendship, love or life.

Jackson, Holbrook

23.

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

Montagu, Lady Mary Wortley

24.

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.

25.

Without books the development of civilization would have been impossible. They are the engines of change, windows on the world, Lighthouses as the poet said erected in the sea of time. They are companions, teachers, magicians, bankers of the treasures of the mind, Books are humanity in print.

Schopenhauer, Arthur

26.

A vacuum of ideas affects people differently than a vacuum of air, otherwise readers of books would be constantly collapsing.

Lichtenberg, Georg C.

27.

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

Barstow, Stan

28.

The chief knowledge that a man gets from reading books is the knowledge that very few of them are worth reading.

Mencken, H. L.

29.

There is creative reading as well as creative writing.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

30.

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

31.

The real risks for any artist are taken in pushing the work to the limits of what is possible, in the attempt to increase the sum of what it is possible to think. Books become good when they go to this edge and risk falling over it --when they endanger the artist by reason of what he has, or has not, artistically dared.

Rushdie, Salman

32.

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

Mansfield, Katherine

33.

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

Chappell, Warren

34.

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

Schopenhauer, Arthur

35.

No story is the same to us after a lapse of time; or rather we who read it are no longer the same interpreters.

Eliot, George

36.

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

37.

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

Hadas, Moses

38.

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

Proverb, American

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.

Read good, big important things.

Noonan, Peggy

41.

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

42.

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

43.

The age of the book is almost gone.

Steiner, George

44.

Books had instant replay long before televised sports.

Williams, Bert

45.

One half who graduate from college never read another book.

True, Herbert

46.

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

Hubbard, Elbert

47.

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

Brodsky, Joseph

48.

Books, books, books had found the secret of a garret-room piled high with cases in my father's name; Piled high, packed large, --where, creeping in and out among the giant fossils of my past, like some small nimble mouse between the ribs of a mastodon, I nibbled here and there at this or that box, pulling through the gap, in heats of terror, haste, victorious joy, the first book first. And how I felt it beat under my pillow, in the morning's dark. An hour before the sun would let me read! My books!

Browning, Elizabeth Barrett

49.

The world of books is the most remarkable creation of man nothing else that he builds ever lasts monuments fall; nations perish; civilization grow old and die out; new races build others. But in the world of books are volumes that have seen this happen again and again and yet live on. Still young, still as fresh as the day they were written, still telling men's hearts, of the hearts of men centuries dead.

Day, Clarence

50.

Reading makes immigrants of us all. It takes us away from home, but more important, it finds homes for us everywhere.

Rochman, Hazel