Motivational Quotes

Books - reading

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

Best Quotes about Books - reading

Every abridgement of a good book is a fool abridged.

Montaigne, Michel Eyquem De

'Tis pleasant, sure, to see one's name in print; A book's a book, although there's nothing in it.

Byron, Lord

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

Byron, Lord

Everything in the world exists to end up in a book.

Mallarme, Stephane

I am a part of everything that I have read.

Kieran, John

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

Books give not wisdom where none was before. But where some is, there reading makes it more.

Harington, John

There was a time when the world acted on books; now books act on the world.

Joubert, Joseph

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

10.

A book worth reading is worth buying.

Ruskin, John

11.

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

Blackie, Professor

12.

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

13.

Books are not absolutely dead things, but do contain a certain potency of life in them, to be as active as the soul whose progeny they are; they preserve, as in a vial, the purest efficacy and extraction of the living intellect that bred them.

Milton, John

14.

A novel must be exceptionally good to live as long as the average cat.

Maclennan, Hugh

15.

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

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.

In science read the newest works, in literature read the oldest.

Bulwer-Lytton, Edward G.

18.

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

19.

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

20.

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

Barstow, Stan

21.

It is books that teach us to refine our pleasures when young, and to recall them with satisfaction when we are old.

Hunt, Leigh

22.

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

23.

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

24.

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.

25.

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

Ruskin, John

26.

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

Schopenhauer, Arthur

27.

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.

28.

There is creative reading as well as creative writing.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

29.

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

30.

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

Porter, Noah

31.

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

Camus, Albert

32.

Don't ask me who's influenced me. A lion is made up of the lambs he's digested, and I've been reading all my life.

Seferis, Giorgos

33.

Beware of the person of one book.

Aquinas, St. Thomas

34.

Books are masters who instruct us without rods or ferules, without words or anger, without bread or money. If you approach them, they are not asleep; if you seek them, they do not hide; if you blunder, they do not scold; if you are ignorant, they do not laugh at you.

Bury, Richard De

35.

Fiction reveals truth that reality obscures.

West, Jessamyn

36.

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

Dawkins, John

37.

Here, my dear Lucy, hide these books. Quick, quick! Fling Peregrine Pickle under the toilette --throw Roderick Random into the closet --put The Innocent Adultery into The Whole Duty of Man; thrust Lord Aimworth under the sofa! cram Ovid behind the bolster; there --put The Man of Feeling into your pocket. Now for them.

Sheridan, Richard Brinsley

38.

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

Baker, Nicholson

39.

A good title is the title of a successful book.

Chandler, Raymond

40.

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

41.

Old books, you know well, are books of the world's youth, and new books are the fruits of its age.

Holmes, Oliver Wendell

42.

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

Montagu, Lady Mary Wortley

43.

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

44.

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

Mencken, H. L.

45.

Tradition is but a meteor, which, if it once falls, cannot be rekindled. Memory, once interrupted, is not to be recalled. But written learning is a fixed luminary, which, after the cloud that had hidden it has passed away, is again bright in its proper station. So books are faithful repositories, which may be awhile neglected or forgotten, but when opened again, will again impart instruction.

Johnson

46.

You've really got to start hitting the books because it's no joke out here.

Lee, Spike

47.

Thy books should, like thy friends, not many be, yet such wherein men may thy judgment see.

Wycherley, William

48.

To read too many books is harmful.

Zedong, Mao

49.

I love to lose myself in other men's minds. When I am not walking, I am reading. I cannot sit and think; books think for me.