Motivational Quotes

Books - reading

Books that you carry to the fire, and hold readily in your hand, are most useful after all.

- Johnson, Samuel

Best Quotes about Books - reading

Read Homer once, and you can read no more. For all books else appear so mean, and so poor. Verse will seem prose; but still persist to read, and Homer will be all the books you need.

Buckingham, Duke of

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

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

A book worth reading is worth buying.

Ruskin, John

No man understands a deep book until he has seen and lived at least part of its contents.

Pound, Ezra

Books are not men and yet they stay alive.

Benet, Stephen Vincent

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

Byron, Lord

A multitude of books distracts the mind.

Socrates

To learn to read is to light a fire; every syllable that is spelled out is a spark.

Hugo, Victor

10.

I don't think any good book is based on factual experience. Bad books are about things the writer already knew before he wrote them.

Fuentes, Carlos

11.

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

Bulwer-Lytton, Edward G.

12.

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

13.

What is reading, but silent conversation.

Landor, Walter Savage

14.

All the known world, excepting only savage nations, is governed by books.

Voltaire

15.

A good title is the title of a successful book.

Chandler, Raymond

16.

Everything you need for better future and success has already been written. And guess what? All you have to do is go to the library.

Rohn, Jim

17.

A book that is shut is but a block.

Fuller, Thomas

18.

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

Mallarme, Stephane

19.

Read good, big important things.

Noonan, Peggy

20.

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

21.

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

Brookner, Anita

22.

A book is like a man -- clever and dull, brave and cowardly, beautiful and ugly. For every flowering thought there will be a page like a wet and mangy mongrel, and for every looping flight a tap on the wing and a reminder that wax cannot hold the feathers firm too near the sun.

Steinbeck, John

23.

Fiction reveals truth that reality obscures.

West, Jessamyn

24.

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

25.

A book might be written on the injustice of the just.

Hope, Anthony

26.

The newest books are those that never grow old.

Jackson, George Holbrook

27.

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.

28.

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

Porter, Noah

29.

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

Schopenhauer, Arthur

30.

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

31.

There are people who read too much: bibliobibuli. I know some who are constantly drunk on books, as other men are drunk on whiskey or religion. They wander through this most diverting and stimulating of worlds in a haze, seeing nothing and hearing nothing.

Mencken, H. L.

32.

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

33.

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

34.

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

Rohn, Jim

35.

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

Byron, Lord

36.

Books are the blessed chloroform of the mind.

Chambers, Robert

37.

A novel is a mirror carried along a main road.

Stendhal, Henri B.

38.

The unread story is not a story; it is little black marks on wood pulp. The reader, reading it, makes it live: a live thing, a story.

Guin, Ursula K. Le

39.

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

Mencken, H. L.

40.

All good books are alike in that they are truer than if they had really happened and after you are finished reading one you will feel that all that happened to you and afterwards it all belongs to you; the good and the bad, the ecstasy, the remorse, and sorrow, the people and the places and how the weather was.

Hemingway, Ernest

41.

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

Coolio

42.

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

Mencken, H. L.

43.

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

Hadas, Moses

44.

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

Holmes, Oliver Wendell

45.

Reading the Scriptures is an uplifting experience.

46.

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

47.

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

48.

Reading is a basic tool in the living of a good life.

Adler, Mortimer J.

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.

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