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

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

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

Mencken, H. L.

In any situation, ask yourself: What strengths do I possess that can contribute towards accomplishing something in this situation? Then follow through.

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

Gibbon, Edward

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

Hadas, Moses

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

A great book should leave you with many experiences and slightly exhausted at the end. You should live several lives while reading it.

Styron, William

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.

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.

10.

A real book is not one that we read, but one that reads us.

Auden, W. H.

11.

A bad book is the worse that it cannot repent. It has not been the devil's policy to keep the masses of mankind in ignorance; but finding that they will read, he is doing all in his power to poison their books.

Kirk, E.N.

12.

My books kept me from the ring, the dog-pit, the tavern, and the saloon.

Hood, Thomas

13.

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

Colton, Charles Caleb

14.

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

Butler, Samuel

15.

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

Schopenhauer, Arthur

16.

Who kills a man kills a reasonable creature, God's image, but thee who destroys a good book, kills reason itself.

Milton, John

17.

The books that the world calls immoral are the books that show the world its own shame.

Wilde, Oscar

18.

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

19.

This is not a book. This is libel, slander, defamation of character. This is not a book, in the ordinary sense of the word. No, this is a prolonged insult, a gob of spit in the face of Art, a kick in the pants to God, Man, Destiny, Time, Love, Beauty... what you will. I am going to sing for you, a little off key perhaps, but I will sing.

Miller, Henry

20.

Prerequisite for rereadability in books: that they be forgettable.

Rostand, Jean

21.

Beware of the person of one book.

Aquinas, St. Thomas

22.

In the case of good books, the point is not how many of them you can get through, but rather how many can get through to you.

Adler, Mortimer J.

23.

Without books the development of civilization would have been impossible. They are the engines of change, windows on the world, Lighthouses as the poet said erected in the sea of time. They are companions, teachers, magicians, bankers of the treasures of the mind, Books are humanity in print.

Schopenhauer, Arthur

24.

The man who does not read books has no advantage over the man that can not read them.

Twain, Mark

25.

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

Coolio

26.

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

Critchfield, Jim

27.

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

Mccay, James T.

28.

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

Joubert, Joseph

29.

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

30.

I always like to look on the optimistic side of life, but I am realistic enough to know that life is a complex matter.

Disney, Walt

31.

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

Camus, Albert

32.

Nine-tenths of the existing books are nonsense and the clever books are the refutation of that nonsense.

Disraeli, Benjamin

33.

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

34.

What is reading, but silent conversation.

Landor, Walter Savage

35.

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

36.

Next, in importance to books are their titles.

Davies, Paul

37.

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

38.

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

Mencken, H. L.

39.

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

40.

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

41.

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

42.

A successful book cannot afford to be more than ten percent new.

Mcluhan, Marshall

43.

As writers become more numerous, it is natural for readers to become more indolent; whence must necessarily arise a desire of attaining knowledge with the greatest possible ease.

Goldsmith, Oliver

44.

For a good book has this quality, that it is not merely a petrifaction of its author, but that once it has been tossed behind, like Deucalion's little stone, it acquires a separate and vivid life of its own.

Lejeune, Caroline

45.

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

Lee, Spike

46.

When you reread a classic, you do not see more in the book than you did before; you see more in you than there was before.

Fadiman, Clifton

47.

Read good, big important things.

Noonan, Peggy

48.

My books are water; those of the great geniuses are wine -- everybody drinks water.

Twain, Mark

49.

In the dark colony of night, when I consider man's magnificent capacity for malice, madness, folly, envy, rage, and destructiveness, and I wonder whether we shall not end up as breakfast for newts and polyps, I seem to hear the muffled cries of all the words in all the books with covers closed.

Rosten, Leo

50.

We ought to reverence books; to look on them as useful and mighty things. If they are good and true, whether they are about religion, politics, farming, trade, law, or medicine, they are the message of Christ, the maker of all things -- the teacher of all truth.

Kingsley, Charles