Motivational Quotes

Books - reading

I am a part of everything that I have read.

- Kieran, John

Best Quotes about Books - reading

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

There are people who read too much: bibliobibuli. I know some who are constantly drunk on books, as other men are drunk on whiskey or religion. They wander through this most diverting and stimulating of worlds in a haze, seeing nothing and hearing nothing.

Mencken, H. L.

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

Proverb, American

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

A novel is a mirror carried along a main road.

Stendhal, Henri B.

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

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

Disraeli, Benjamin

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

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

Gibbon, Edward

10.

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

Marcel, Anthony

11.

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

Tupper, Martin

12.

A book is like a man -- clever and dull, brave and cowardly, beautiful and ugly. For every flowering thought there will be a page like a wet and mangy mongrel, and for every looping flight a tap on the wing and a reminder that wax cannot hold the feathers firm too near the sun.

Steinbeck, John

13.

Readers are plentiful: thinkers are rare.

Martineau, Harriet

14.

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

15.

There is creative reading as well as creative writing.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

16.

How can you dare teach a man to read until you've taught him everything else first?

Shaw, George Bernard

17.

A bibliophile of little means is likely to suffer often. Books don't slip from his hands but fly past him through the air, high as birds, high as prices.

Neruda, Pablo

18.

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

19.

Somewhere, everywhere, now hidden, now apparent in what ever is written down, is the form of a human being. If we seek to know him, are we idly occupied?

Woolf, Virginia

20.

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.

21.

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

Faulkner, William

22.

God be thanked for books; they are the voices of the distant and the dead, and make us heirs of the spiritual life of past ages.

Channing, William Ellery

23.

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

Carey, Joyce

24.

Prerequisite for rereadability in books: that they be forgettable.

Rostand, Jean

25.

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

Colton, Charles Caleb

26.

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

27.

How many a man has dated a new era in his life from the reading of a book! The book exists for us, perchance, that will explain our miracles and reveal new ones. The at present unutterable things we may find somewhere uttered.

Thoreau, Henry David

28.

What is reading, but silent conversation.

Landor, Walter Savage

29.

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

Auden, W. H.

30.

Very young children eat their books, literally devouring their contents. This is one reason for the scarcity of first editions of Alice in Wonderland and other favorites of the nursery.

Rosenbach, A. S. W.

31.

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

32.

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

33.

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

Maclennan, Hugh

34.

The unread story is not a story; it is little black marks on wood pulp. The reader, reading it, makes it live: a live thing, a story.

Guin, Ursula K. Le

35.

Books give not wisdom where none was before. But where some is, there reading makes it more.

Harington, John

36.

The books we think we ought to read are poky, dull, and dry; The books that we would like to read we are ashamed to buy; The books that people talk about we never can recall; And the books that people give us, oh, they're the worst of all.

Wells, Carolyn

37.

Read, read, read. Read everything-- trash, classics, good and bad, and see how they do it. Just like a carpenter who works as an apprentice and studies the master. Read! You'll absorb it. Then write. If it is good, you'll find out. If it's not, throw it out the window.

Faulkner, William

38.

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

Byron, Lord

39.

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

40.

Books are not men and yet they stay alive.

Benet, Stephen Vincent

41.

The good of a book lies in its being read. A book is made up of signs that speak of other signs, which in their turn speak of things. Without an eye to read them, a book contains signs that produce no concepts; therefore it is dumb.

Eco, Umberto

42.

There are very many people who read simply to prevent themselves from thinking.

Lichtenberg, Georg C.

43.

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

Erasmus, Desiderius

44.

Reading furnishes the mind only with material for knowledge; it is thinking that makes what we read ours.

Locke, John

45.

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

46.

What gunpowder did for war the printing press has done for the mind.

Phillips, Wendell

47.

The reason that fiction is more interesting than any other form of literature, to those who really like to study people, is that in fiction the author can really tell the truth without humiliating himself.

Roosevelt, Eleanor

48.

Today a reader, tomorrow a leader.

Fusselman, W.

49.

A book that is shut is but a block.

Fuller, Thomas

50.

One always tends to overpraise a long book, because one has got through it.

Forster, Edward M.