Motivational Quotes

Books - reading

Except a living man there is nothing more wonderful than a book! a message to us from the dead -- from human souls we never saw, who lived, perhaps, thousands of miles away. And yet these, in those little sheets of paper, speak to us, arouse us, terrify us, teach us, comfort us, open their hearts to us as brothers.

- Kingsley, Charles

Best Quotes about Books - reading

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

Books, books, books had found the secret of a garret-room piled high with cases in my father's name; Piled high, packed large, --where, creeping in and out among the giant fossils of my past, like some small nimble mouse between the ribs of a mastodon, I nibbled here and there at this or that box, pulling through the gap, in heats of terror, haste, victorious joy, the first book first. And how I felt it beat under my pillow, in the morning's dark. An hour before the sun would let me read! My books!

Browning, Elizabeth Barrett

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

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

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

Twain, Mark

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

Wilde, Oscar

Reading is equivalent to thinking with someone else's head instead of with one's own.

Schopenhauer, Arthur

Reading the Scriptures is an uplifting experience.

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

Jackson, Holbrook

10.

Does there, I wonder, exist a being who has read all, or approximately all, that the person of average culture is supposed to have read, and that not to have read is a social sin? If such a being does exist, surely he is an old, a very old man.

Bennett, Arnold

11.

In science read the newest works, in literature read the oldest.

Bulwer-Lytton, Edward G.

12.

Books that you carry to the fire, and hold readily in your hand, are most useful after all.

Johnson, Samuel

13.

Books are the best of things if well used; if abused, among the worst. They are good for nothing but to inspire. I had better never see a book than be warped by its attraction clean out of my own orbit, and made a satellite instead of a system.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

14.

No man understands a deep book until he has seen and lived at least part of its contents.

Pound, Ezra

15.

Prerequisite for rereadability in books: that they be forgettable.

Rostand, Jean

16.

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

17.

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

Disraeli, Benjamin

18.

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

Hood, Thomas

19.

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

Critchfield, Jim

20.

Books in a large university library system: 2, 000,000. Books in an average large city library: 1 0,000. Average number of books in a chain bookstore: 30, 000. Books in an average neighborhood branch library: 20, 000.

Horowitz, Lois

21.

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

22.

If I had my way books would not be written in English, but in an exceedingly difficult secret language that only skilled professional readers and story-tellers could interpret. Then people like you would have to go to public halls and pay good prices to hear the professionals decode and read the books aloud for you. This plan would have the advantage of scaring off all amateur authors, retired politicians, country doctors and I-Married-a-Midget writers who would not have the patience to learn the secret language.

Davies, Robertson

23.

The things I want to know are in books; my best friend is the man who'll get me a book I ain't read.

Lincoln, Abraham

24.

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

Harington, John

25.

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

Brown, Les

26.

No furniture is so charming as books.

Smith, Sydney

27.

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.

28.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

29.

A vacuum of ideas affects people differently than a vacuum of air, otherwise readers of books would be constantly collapsing.

Lichtenberg, Georg C.

30.

Beware of the person of one book.

Aquinas, St. Thomas

31.

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

Mallarme, Stephane

32.

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

Butler, Samuel

33.

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

Belloc, Hilaire

34.

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

Faulkner, William

35.

Every abridgement of a good book is a fool abridged.

Montaigne, Michel Eyquem De

36.

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

37.

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

Hadas, Moses

38.

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

39.

Read Homer once, and you can read no more. For all books else appear so mean, and so poor. Verse will seem prose; but still persist to read, and Homer will be all the books you need.

Buckingham, Duke of

40.

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

Channing, William Ellery

41.

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

42.

The words of my book nothing, the drift of it everything.

Whitman, Walt

43.

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

Erasmus, Desiderius

44.

Fiction reveals truth that reality obscures.

West, Jessamyn

45.

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

Gibbon, Edward

46.

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

Colton, Charles Caleb

47.

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

48.

I love to lose myself in other men's minds. When I am not walking, I am reading. I cannot sit and think; books think for me.

Lamb, Charles

49.

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

Phillips, Wendell

50.

The age of the book is almost gone.

Steiner, George