Motivational Quotes

Books - reading

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

- Kempis, Thomas

Best Quotes about Books - reading

A book may be compared to your neighbor: if it be good, it cannot last too long; if bad, you cannot get rid of it too early.

Brooke, Rupert

To use books rightly, is to go to them for help; to appeal to them when our own knowledge and power fail; to be led by them into wider sight and purer conception than our own, and to receive from them the united sentence of the judges and councils of all time, against our solitary and unstable opinions.

Ruskin, John

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

There is a set of religious, or rather moral, writings which teach that virtue is the certain road to happiness, and vice to misery in this world. A very wholesome and comfortable doctrine, and to which we have but one objection, namely, that it is not true.

Fielding, Henry

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

Faulkner, William

A house is not a home unless it contains food and fire for the mind as well as the body.

Fuller, Margaret

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

Lee, Spike

To sit alone in the lamplight with a book spread out before you hold intimate converse with men of unseen generations -- such is pleasure beyond compare.

Kenko, Yoshida

I would sooner read a timetable or a catalog than nothing at all.

Maugham, W. Somerset

10.

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

11.

Read as you taste fruit or savor wine, or enjoy friendship, love or life.

Jackson, Holbrook

12.

When you have mastered numbers, you will in fact no longer be reading numbers, any more than you read words when reading books You will be reading meanings.

Geneen, Harold S.

13.

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

14.

Any book that helps a child to form a habit of reading, to make reading one of his deep and continuing needs, is good for him.

McKenna, Richard

15.

I divide all readers into two classes: those who read to remember and those who read to forget.

Phelps, William Lyon

16.

Books are men of higher stature; the only men that speak aloud for future times to hear.

Barrett, E.S.

17.

My early and invincible love of reading I would not exchange for all the riches of India.

Gibbon, Edward

18.

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

19.

Education... has produced a vast population able to read but unable to distinguish what is worth reading, an easy prey to sensations and cheap appeals.

Trevelyan, G. M.

20.

We should be as careful of the books we read, as of the company we keep. The dead very often have more power than the living.

Edwards, Tryon

21.

A novel is a mirror carried along a main road.

Stendhal, Henri B.

22.

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

23.

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

24.

This book is not to be tossed lightly aside, but to be hurled with great force.

Parker, Dorothy

25.

From the moment I picked your book up until I laid it down I was convulsed with laughter. Some day I intend reading it.

Marx, Groucho

26.

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

Trollope, Anthony

27.

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

28.

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

29.

The classics are only primitive literature. They belong to the same class as primitive machinery and primitive music and primitive medicine.

Leacock, Stephen B.

30.

The age of the book is almost gone.

Steiner, George

31.

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

Colton, Charles Caleb

32.

To read well, that is, to read true books in a true spirit, is a noble exercise, and one that will task the reader more than any other exercise which the customs of the day esteem. It requires a training such as the athletes underwent, the steady intention almost of the whole life to this object.

Thoreau, Henry David

33.

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

Murray, William

34.

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

Asimov, Isaac

35.

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

Hadas, Moses

36.

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

37.

A bad book is as much of a labor to write as a good one; it comes as sincerely from the author's soul.

Huxley, Aldous

38.

After all manner of professors have done their best for us, the place we are to get knowledge is in books. The true university of these days is a collection of books.

Carlyle, Thomas

39.

A good book is the very essence of a good man. His virtues survive in it, while the foibles and faults of his actual life are forgotten. All the goodly company of the excellent and great sit around my table, or look down on me from yonder shelves, waiting patiently to answer my questions and enrich me with their wisdom. A precious book is a foretaste of immortality.

Cuyler, Theodore L.

40.

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

41.

Miss a meal if you have to, but don't miss a book.

Rohn, Jim

42.

Every abridgement of a good book is a fool abridged.

Montaigne, Michel Eyquem De

43.

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

Channing, William Ellery

44.

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

Hugo, Victor

45.

I am what libraries and librarians have made me, with little assistance from a professor of Greek and poets.

Sandwell, B. K.

46.

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

47.

Books are the bees which carry the quickening pollen from one to another mind.

Lowell, James Russell

48.

This will never be a civilized country until we expend more money for books than we do for chewing gum.

Hubbard, Elbert

49.

The books we read should be chosen with great care, that they may be, as an Egyptian king wrote over his library, The medicines of the soul.

Hood, Paxton

50.

The pleasure of reading is doubled when one lives with another who shares the same books.