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

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

Mallarme, Stephane

Reading a book is like re-writing it for yourself. You bring to a novel, anything you read, all your experience of the world. You bring your history and you read it in your own terms.

Carter, Angela

No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader.

Frost, Robert

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

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

Gibbon, Edward

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

A house without books is like a room without windows. No man has a right to bring up his children without surrounding them with books, if he has the means to buy them. It is a wrong to his family. Children learn to read by being in the presence of books. The love of knowledge comes with reading and grows upon it. And the love of knowledge, in a young mind, is almost always a warrant against the inferior excitement of passions and vices.

Mann, Horace

Read nothing that you do not care to remember, and remember nothing you do not mean to use.

Blackie, Professor

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

Locke, John

10.

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

11.

I know every book of mine by its smell, and I have but to put my nose between the pages to be reminded of all sorts of things.

Gissing, George Robert

12.

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

Pound, Ezra

13.

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''

14.

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

Forster, Edward M.

15.

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.

16.

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.

17.

Most books today seemed to have been written overnight from books read the day before.

Chamfort, Sebastien-Roch Nicolas De

18.

He has only half learned the art of reading who has not added to it the more refined art of skipping and skimming.

Balfour, Arthur James

19.

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

Phillips, Wendell

20.

Early in the morning, at break of day, in all the freshness and dawn of one's strength, to read a book --I call that vicious!

Nietzsche, Friedrich

21.

The great American novel has not only already been written, it has already been rejected.

Dane, Frank

22.

The constant habit of perusing devout books is so indispensable, that it has been termed the oil of the lamp of prayer. Too much reading, however, and too little meditation, may produce the effect of a lamp inverted; which is extinguished by the very excess of that ailment, whose property is to feed it.

More, Hannah

23.

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

Wycherley, William

24.

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

Pascal, Blaise

25.

The lessons taught in great books are misleading. The commerce in life is rarely so simple and never so just.

Brookner, Anita

26.

Today a reader, tomorrow a leader.

Fusselman, W.

27.

The worst readers are those who behave like plundering troops: they take away a few things they can use, dirty and confound the remainder, and revile the whole.

Nietzsche, Friedrich

28.

You should read books like you take medicine, by advice, and not by advertisement.

Ruskin, John

29.

A multitude of books distracts the mind.

Socrates

30.

Books constitute capital. A library book lasts as long as a house, for hundreds of years. It is not, then, an article of mere consumption but fairly of capital, and often in the case of professional men, setting out in life, it is their only capital.

Jefferson, Thomas

31.

Do we write books so that they shall merely be read? Don't we also write them for employment in the household? For one that is read from start to finish, thousands are leafed through, other thousands lie motionless, others are jammed against mouseholes, thrown at rats, others are stood on, sat on, drummed on, have gingerbread baked on them or are used to light pipes.

Lichtenberg, Georg C.

32.

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

33.

I read the newspaper avidly. It is my one form of continuous fiction.

Bevan, Aneurin

34.

As writers become more numerous, it is natural for readers to become more indolent; whence must necessarily arise a desire of attaining knowledge with the greatest possible ease.

Goldsmith, Oliver

35.

The books that everybody admires are those that nobody reads.

France, Anatole

36.

There are two kinds of books. Those that no one reads and those that no one ought to read.

Mencken, H. L.

37.

The good parts of a book may be only something a writer is lucky enough to overhear or it may be the wreck of his whole damn life --and one is as good as the other.

Hemingway, Ernest

38.

A wicked book cannot repent.

Proverb

39.

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

40.

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

Mansfield, Katherine

41.

The printing press is either the greatest blessing or the greatest curse of modern times, sometimes one forgets which it is.

Barrie, Sir James M.

42.

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

Auden, W. H.

43.

Surviving and thriving as a professional today demands two new approaches to the written word. First, it requires a new approach to orchestrating information, by skillfully choosing what to read and what to ignore. Second, it requires a new approach to integrating information, by reading faster and with greater comprehension.

Calano, Jimmy

44.

A conventional good read is usually a bad read, a relaxing bath in what we know already. A true good read is surely an act of innovative creation in which we, the readers, become conspirators.

Bradbury, Malcolm

45.

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

46.

There are worse crimes than burning books. One of them is not reading them.

Brodsky, Joseph

47.

When the book comes out it may hurt you -- but in order for me to do it, it had to hurt me first. I can only tell you about yourself as much as I can face about myself.

Baldwin, James

48.

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

Erasmus, Desiderius

49.

Books are divided into two classes, the books of the hour and the books of all time.

Ruskin, John

50.

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