Motivational Quotes

Books - reading

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

Best Quotes about Books - reading

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

Holmes, Oliver Wendell

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.

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

Murray, William

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

Dawkins, John

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

Bulwer-Lytton, Edward G.

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

Brodsky, Joseph

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

Byron, Lord

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''

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

Lee, Spike

10.

If I have not read a book before, it is, for all intents and purposes, new to me whether it was printed yesterday or three hundred years ago.

Hazlitt, William

11.

Some books leave us free and some books make us free.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

12.

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

Gibbon, Edward

13.

Some of the most famous books are the least worth reading. Their fame was due to their having done something that needed to be doing in their day. The work is done and the virtue of the book has expired.

Morely, John

14.

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

15.

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

Coolio

16.

Ideally a book would have no order to it, and the reader would have to discover his own.

Vaneigem, Raoul

17.

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

Marcel, Anthony

18.

Book love... is your pass to the greatest, the purest, and the most perfect pleasure that God has prepared for His creatures.

Trollope, Anthony

19.

Books and marriage go ill together.

Moliere

20.

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

Mencken, H. L.

21.

I suggest that the only books that influence us are those for which we are ready, and which have gone a little further down our particular path than we have yet got ourselves.

Forster, Edward M.

22.

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

23.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

24.

What is reading, but silent conversation.

Landor, Walter Savage

25.

The worst readers are those who behave like plundering troops: they take away a few things they can use, dirty and confound the remainder, and revile the whole.

Nietzsche, Friedrich

26.

The books that everybody admires are those that nobody reads.

France, Anatole

27.

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

28.

The lessons taught in great books are misleading. The commerce in life is rarely so simple and never so just.

Brookner, Anita

29.

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.

Lamb, Charles

30.

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

31.

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

Hadas, Moses

32.

I am a part of everything that I have read.

Kieran, John

33.

The things I want to know are in books; my best friend is the man who'll get me a book I ain't read.

Lincoln, Abraham

34.

What gunpowder did for war the printing press has done for the mind.

Phillips, Wendell

35.

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

Barstow, Stan

36.

Reading the Scriptures is an uplifting experience.

37.

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

Proverb, American

38.

No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader.

Frost, Robert

39.

A house without books is like a room without windows. No man has a right to bring up his children without surrounding them with books, if he has the means to buy them. It is a wrong to his family. Children learn to read by being in the presence of books. The love of knowledge comes with reading and grows upon it. And the love of knowledge, in a young mind, is almost always a warrant against the inferior excitement of passions and vices.

Mann, Horace

40.

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.

41.

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

Critchfield, Jim

42.

A conventional good read is usually a bad read, a relaxing bath in what we know already. A true good read is surely an act of innovative creation in which we, the readers, become conspirators.

Bradbury, Malcolm

43.

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

44.

When a book raises your spirit, and inspires you with noble and manly thoughts, seek for no other test of its excellence. It is good, and made by a good workman.

Bruyere, Jean De La

45.

To read well, that is, to read true books in a true spirit, is a noble exercise, and one that will task the reader more than any other exercise which the customs of the day esteem. It requires a training such as the athletes underwent, the steady intention almost of the whole life to this object.

Thoreau, Henry David

46.

You will, I am sure, agree with me that... if page 534 only finds us in the second chapter, the length of the first one must have been really intolerable.

Doyle, Sir Arthur Conan

47.

Books are those faithful mirrors that reflect to our mind the minds of sages and heroes.

Gibbon, Edward

48.

A multitude of books distracts the mind.

Socrates

49.

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

50.

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