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

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

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

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

Bach, Richard

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

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

Murray, William

The last thing one discovers in composing a work is what to put first.

Pascal, Blaise

It is from books that wise people derive consolation in the troubles of life.

Hugo, Victor

Begin to read a book that will help you move toward your dream.

Brown, Les

No furniture is so charming as books.

Smith, Sydney

10.

Learning to read has been reduced to a process of mastering a series of narrow, specific, hierarchical skills. Where armed-forces recruits learn the components of a rifle or the intricacies of close order drill by the numbers, recruits to reading learn its mechanics sound by sound and word by word.

Gross, Jacquelyn

11.

A novel is a mirror carried along a main road.

Stendhal, Henri B.

12.

You will find most books worth reading are worth reading twice.

Morely, John

13.

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

Lee, Harper

14.

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

Pound, Ezra

15.

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

Proverb, American

16.

The successful Accelerated Reader is able to read larger than normal blocks or bites of the printed page with each eye stop. He has accepted, without reservation, the philosophy that the most important benefit of reading is the gaining of information, ideas, mental picture and entertainment-not the fretting over words. He has come to the realization that words in and of themselves are for the most part insignificant.

Cutler, Wade E.

17.

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

18.

Books and marriage go ill together.

Moliere

19.

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

20.

When I get a little money, I buy books; and if any is left I buy food and clothes.

Erasmus, Desiderius

21.

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

22.

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

Carlyle, Thomas

23.

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

Mallarme, Stephane

24.

'Tis the good reader that makes the good book; in every book he finds passages which seem to be confidences or sides hidden from all else and unmistakably meant for his ear; the profit of books is according to the sensibility of the reader; the profound thought or passion sleeps as in a mine, until it is discovered by an equal mind and heart.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

25.

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.

26.

Books to judicious compilers, are useful; to particular arts and professions, they are absolutely necessary; to men of real science, they are tools: but more are tools to them.

Johnson

27.

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

28.

There is creative reading as well as creative writing.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

29.

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

30.

The mortality of all inanimate things is terrible to me, but that of books most of all.

Howells, William Dean

31.

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

Camus, Albert

32.

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

33.

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

Joubert, Joseph

34.

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

Baker, Nicholson

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 standing counselors and preachers, always at hand, and always disinterested; having this advantage over oral instructors, that they are ready to repeat their lesson as often as we please.

Chambers, Oswald

37.

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

Byron, Lord

38.

You will be the same person in five as you are today except for the people you meet and the books you read.

Jones, Charles ''Tremendous''

39.

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

40.

Most books, like their authors, are born to die; of only a few books can it be said that death has no dominion over them; they live, and their influence lives forever.

Swartz, J.

41.

There are books so alive that you're always afraid that while you weren't reading, the book has gone and changed, has shifted like a river; while you went on living, it went on living too, and like a river moved on and moved away. No one has stepped twice into the same river. But did anyone ever step twice into the same book?

Tsvetaeva, Marina

42.

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

Rohn, Jim

43.

Thy books should, like thy friends, not many be, yet such wherein men may thy judgment see.

Wycherley, William

44.

Fiction reveals truth that reality obscures.

West, Jessamyn

45.

When I am dead, I hope it may be said: His sins were scarlet, but his books were read.

Belloc, Hilaire

46.

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

47.

I heard his library burned down and both books were destroyed -- and one of them hadn't even been colored in yet.

Dawkins, John

48.

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

Wilde, Oscar

49.

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

50.

Old books that have ceased to be of service should no more be abandoned than should old friends who have ceased to give pleasure.

Worsthorne, Sir Peregrine