Motivational Quotes

Books - reading

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

Best Quotes about Books - reading

The Brahmins say that in their books there are many predictions of times in which it will rain. But press those books as strongly as you can, you can not get out of them a drop of water. So you can not get out of all the books that contain the best precepts the smallest good deed.

Tolstoy, Count Leo

Books are lighthouses erected in the great sea of time.

Whipple, Edwin P.

Everything in this book may be wrong. [The Savior's Manual]

Bach, Richard

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

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.

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

Leacock, Stephen B.

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

Montagu, Lady Mary Wortley

If a book comes from the heart it will contrive to reach other hearts. All art and author craft are of small account to that.

Carlyle, Thomas

We are too civil to books. For a few golden sentences we will turn over and actually read a volume of four or five hundred pages.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

10.

What is reading, but silent conversation.

Landor, Walter Savage

11.

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

12.

Then I though of reading -- the nice and subtle happiness of reading ... this joy not dulled by age, this polite and unpunishable vice, this selfish, serene, lifelong intoxication.

Smith, Logan Pearsall

13.

There is no robber worse than a bad book.

Proverb, Italian

14.

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

Temple, Sir William

15.

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

16.

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

Phelps, William Lyon

17.

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

Hadas, Moses

18.

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

19.

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

Forster, Edward M.

20.

Books and marriage go ill together.

Moliere

21.

Books succeed, and lives fail.

Browning, Elizabeth Barrett

22.

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

Barrett, E.S.

23.

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

24.

The reason a writer writes a book is to forget a book and the reason a reader reads one is to remember it.

Wolfe, Thomas

25.

When we read a story, we inhabit it. The covers of the book are like a roof and four walls. What is to happen next will take place within the four walls of the story. And this is possible because the story's voice makes everything its own.

Berger, John

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.

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

28.

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

Murray, William

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.

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

Camus, Albert

31.

Books are the bees which carry the quickening pollen from one to another mind.

Lowell, James Russell

32.

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.

33.

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

Mccay, James T.

34.

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

Faulkner, William

35.

There is creative reading as well as creative writing.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

36.

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

Secondat, Charles de

37.

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

Byron, Lord

38.

The oldest books are still only just out to those who have not read them.

Butler, Samuel

39.

You can either read something many times in order to be assured that you got it all, or else you can define your purpose and use techniques which will assure that you have met it and gotten what you need.

Kump, Peter

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.

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

Millay, Edna St. Vincent

42.

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

Jackson, Holbrook

43.

Reading is to the mind what exercise is to the body. It is wholesome and bracing for the mind to have its faculties kept on the stretch.

Steele, Sir Richard

44.

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

45.

Five daily newspapers arrive in my California driveway. The New York times and the Wall Street Journal are supplemented by three local papers. As for magazines, I read, or at least skim, Business Week, Forbes, The Economist, INC; Industry Week, Fortune. Other subscriptions include Sales and Marketing Management, Modern Health Care, Progressive Grocer, High Tech Business, and Slaon Management Review from MIT. I religiously read Business Tokyo, Asia Week, and Far Eastern Economic Review. I glance at Newsweek and Time ... but I devour the New Republic, Policy Review, Foreign Affairs, The Washington Monthly, and Public Interest. How about books? A dozen or more each month.

Peters, Thomas J.

46.

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

Channing, William Ellery

47.

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

48.

A book that is shut is but a block.

Fuller, Thomas

49.

Read good, big important things.