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

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

Faulkner, William

To buy books would be a good thing if we also could buy the time to read them.

Schopenhauer, Arthur

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

Camus, Albert

Every abridgement of a good book is a fool abridged.

Montaigne, Michel Eyquem De

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

No furniture is so charming as books.

Smith, Sydney

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

Books are not men and yet they stay alive.

Benet, Stephen Vincent

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

Marcel, Anthony

10.

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

11.

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

12.

Books constitute capital. A library book lasts as long as a house, for hundreds of years. It is not, then, an article of mere consumption but fairly of capital, and often in the case of professional men, setting out in life, it is their only capital.

Jefferson, Thomas

13.

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

Maclennan, Hugh

14.

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

15.

A good title is the title of a successful book.

Chandler, Raymond

16.

Books are the blessed chloroform of the mind.

Chambers, Robert

17.

The age of the book is almost gone.

Steiner, George

18.

Much reading is an oppression of the mind, and extinguishes the natural candle, which is the reason of so many senseless scholars in the world.

Penn, William

19.

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.

20.

A good book is the best of friends, the same today and for ever.

Tupper, Martin

21.

She could give herself up to the written word as naturally as a good dancer to music or a fine swimmer to water. The only difficulty was that after finishing the last sentence she was left with a feeling at once hollow and uncomfortably full. Exactly like indigestion.

Rhys, Jean

22.

There is no robber worse than a bad book.

Proverb, Italian

23.

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

24.

The flood of print has turned reading into a process of gulping rather than savoring

Chappell, Warren

25.

All the best stories in the world are but one story in reality -- the story of escape. It is the only thing which interests us all and at all times, how to escape.

Benson, Arthur Christopher

26.

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

27.

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

28.

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

29.

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.

30.

Next, in importance to books are their titles.

Davies, Paul

31.

The books that everybody admires are those that nobody reads.

France, Anatole

32.

Next to acquiring good friends, the best acquisition is that of good books.

Colton, Charles Caleb

33.

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

Proverb, American

34.

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

35.

With one day's reading a man may have the key in his hands.

Pound, Ezra

36.

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.

37.

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

Porter, Noah

38.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

39.

Early in the morning, at break of day, in all the freshness and dawn of one's strength, to read a book --I call that vicious!

Nietzsche, Friedrich

40.

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

41.

I feel like I'm drowning. Every night, I'm carrying home loads of things to read but I'm too exhausted. I keep clipping things and Xeroxing them and planning to read them eventually, but I just end up throwing it all away and feeling guilty.

Levine, Ghita

42.

The books one reads in childhood, and perhaps most of all the bad and good bad books, create in one's mind a sort of false map of the world, a series of fabulous countries into which one can retreat at odd moments throughout the rest of life, and which in some cases can survive a visit to the real countries which they are supposed to represent.

Orwell, George

43.

I am not a speed reader. I am a speed understander.

Asimov, Isaac

44.

Readers are plentiful: thinkers are rare.

Martineau, Harriet

45.

I always begin at the left with the opening word of the sentence and read toward the right and I recommend this method.

Thurber, James

46.

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

Carey, Joyce

47.

I read the newspaper avidly. It is my one form of continuous fiction.

Bevan, Aneurin

48.

All my good reading, you might say, was done in the toilet. There are passages in Ulysses which can be read only in the toilet -- if one wants to extract the full flavor of their content.

Miller, Henry

49.

The best effect of any book, is that it excites the reader to self-activity.

Carlyle, Thomas

50.

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