Motivational Quotes

Books - reading

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

- Joubert, Joseph

Best Quotes about Books - reading

Next, in importance to books are their titles.

Davies, Paul

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.

Until I feared I would lose it, I never loved to read. One does not love breathing.

Lee, Harper

The Bible remained for me a book of books, still divine -- but divine in the sense that all great books are divine which teach men how to live righteously.

Keith, Sir Arthur

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

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

Mallarme, Stephane

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

Gibbon, Edward

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

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

10.

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

11.

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

Trollope, Anthony

12.

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

13.

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

14.

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

Schopenhauer, Arthur

15.

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

Vaneigem, Raoul

16.

There is more treasure in books than in all the pirates loot on Treasure Island and best of all, you can enjoy these riches every day of your life.

Disney, Walt

17.

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

Marcel, Anthony

18.

The novel can't compete with cars, the movies, television, and liquor. A guy who's had a good feed and tanked up on good wine gives his old lady a kiss after supper and his day is over. Finished.

Celine, Louis-Ferdinand

19.

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

Maclennan, Hugh

20.

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

Mcluhan, Marshall

21.

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

22.

The power of a text is different when it is read from when it is copied out. Only the copied text thus commands the soul of him who is occupied with it, whereas the mere reader never discovers the new aspects of his inner self that are opened by the text, that road cut through the interior jungle forever closing behind it: because the reader follows the movement of his mind in the free flight of day-dreaming, whereas the copier submits it to command.

Benjamin, Walter

23.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

24.

To read too many books is harmful.

Zedong, Mao

25.

Footnotes are the finer-suckered surfaces that allow testicular paragraphs to hold fast to the wider reality of the library.

Baker, Nicholson

26.

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

27.

Americans will listen, but they do not care to read. War and Peace must wait for the leisure of retirement, which never really comes: meanwhile it helps to furnish the living room. Blockbusting fiction is bought as furniture. Unread, it maintains its value. Read, it looks like money wasted. Cunningly, Americans know that books contain a person, and they want the person, not the book.

Burgess, Anthony

28.

Reading makes immigrants of us all. It takes us away from home, but more important, it finds homes for us everywhere.

Rochman, Hazel

29.

The age of the book is almost gone.

Steiner, George

30.

A book that is shut is but a block.

Fuller, Thomas

31.

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

Channing, William Ellery

32.

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

33.

In science, read by preference the newest works. In literature, read the oldest. The classics are always modern.

Lytton, Lord Edward

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.

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.

36.

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

Wilde, Oscar

37.

The book you don't read won't help.

Rohn, Jim

38.

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

Temple, Sir William

39.

Those who do not read are no better off than those who cannot read.

40.

Until it is kindled by a spirit as flamingly alive as the one which gave it birth a book is dead to us. Words divested of their magic are but dead hieroglyphs.

Miller, Henry

41.

No story is the same to us after a lapse of time; or rather we who read it are no longer the same interpreters.

Eliot, George

42.

Every abridgement of a good book is a fool abridged.

Montaigne, Michel Eyquem De

43.

He that loves a book will never want a faithful friend, a wholesome counselor, a cheerful companion, an effectual comforter. By study, by reading, by thinking, one may innocently divert and pleasantly entertain himself, as in all weathers, as in all fortunes.

Barrow

44.

To feel most beautifully alive means to be reading something beautiful, ready always to apprehend in the flow of language the sudden flash of poetry.

Bachelard, Gaston

45.

A good book, in the language of the book-sellers, is a salable one; in that of the curious, a scarce one; in that of men of sense, a useful and instructive one.

Chambers, Oswald

46.

Everywhere I have sought rest and not found it, except sitting in a corner by myself with a little book.

Kempis, Thomas

47.

No furniture is so charming as books.

Smith, Sydney

48.

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

Critchfield, Jim

49.

Read good, big important things.