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

My books kept me from the ring, the dog-pit, the tavern, and the saloon.

Hood, Thomas

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

Mccay, James T.

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

Hubbard, Elbert

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

Carey, Joyce

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

Ruskin, John

The good of a book lies in its being read. A book is made up of signs that speak of other signs, which in their turn speak of things. Without an eye to read them, a book contains signs that produce no concepts; therefore it is dumb.

Eco, Umberto

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

Temple, Sir William

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

Marcel, Anthony

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

10.

If I had my way books would not be written in English, but in an exceedingly difficult secret language that only skilled professional readers and story-tellers could interpret. Then people like you would have to go to public halls and pay good prices to hear the professionals decode and read the books aloud for you. This plan would have the advantage of scaring off all amateur authors, retired politicians, country doctors and I-Married-a-Midget writers who would not have the patience to learn the secret language.

Davies, Robertson

11.

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

12.

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

13.

There is creative reading as well as creative writing.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

14.

Books, like friends, should be few and well chosen. Like friends, too, we should return to them again and again for, like true friends, they will never fail us -- never cease to instruct -- never cloy.

Colton, Charles Caleb

15.

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

Barstow, Stan

16.

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

17.

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

Blackie, Professor

18.

For a good book has this quality, that it is not merely a petrifaction of its author, but that once it has been tossed behind, like Deucalion's little stone, it acquires a separate and vivid life of its own.

Lejeune, Caroline

19.

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

20.

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

Millay, Edna St. Vincent

21.

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

22.

Many books require no thought from those who read them, and for a very simple reason: they made no such demand upon those who wrote them. Those works, therefore, are the most valuable, that set our thinking faculties in the fullest operation. understand them.

Clarendon

23.

Books are standing counselors and preachers, always at hand, and always disinterested; having this advantage over oral instructors, that they are ready to repeat their lesson as often as we please.

Chambers, Oswald

24.

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

25.

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

Luther, Martin

26.

A wicked book cannot repent.

Proverb

27.

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

28.

Books are men of higher stature; the only men that speak aloud for future times to hear.

Barrett, E.S.

29.

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

30.

A big leather-bound volume makes an ideal razor strap. A thin book is useful to stick under a table with a broken caster to steady it. A large, flat atlas can be used to cover a window with a broken pane. And a thick, old-fashioned heavy book with a clasp is the finest thing in the world to throw at a noisy cat.

Twain, Mark

31.

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

Morely, John

32.

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

Auden, W. H.

33.

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

34.

In the dark colony of night, when I consider man's magnificent capacity for malice, madness, folly, envy, rage, and destructiveness, and I wonder whether we shall not end up as breakfast for newts and polyps, I seem to hear the muffled cries of all the words in all the books with covers closed.

Rosten, Leo

35.

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

36.

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

37.

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

38.

Reading is equivalent to thinking with someone else's head instead of with one's own.

Schopenhauer, Arthur

39.

When I get a little money, I buy books; and if any is left I buy food and clothes.

Erasmus, Desiderius

40.

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

41.

The good parts of a book may be only something a writer is lucky enough to overhear or it may be the wreck of his whole damn life --and one is as good as the other.

Hemingway, Ernest

42.

The tools I need for my work are paper, tobacco, food, and a little whiskey.

Faulkner, William

43.

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

Rohn, Jim

44.

You will be the same person in five as you are today except for the people you meet and the books you read.

Jones, Charles ''Tremendous''

45.

To feel most beautifully alive means to be reading something beautiful, ready always to apprehend in the flow of language the sudden flash of poetry.