Motivational Quotes

Books - reading

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.

Best Quotes about Books - reading

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

Morely, John

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

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

To buy books would be a good thing if we also could buy the time to read them.

Schopenhauer, Arthur

The novel can't compete with cars, the movies, television, and liquor. A guy who's had a good feed and tanked up on good wine gives his old lady a kiss after supper and his day is over. Finished.

Celine, Louis-Ferdinand

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

Phelps, William Lyon

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

A successful book cannot afford to be more than ten percent new.

Mcluhan, Marshall

Fiction reveals truth that reality obscures.

West, Jessamyn

10.

The reading of all good books is like a conversation with all the finest men of past centuries.

Descartes, Rene

11.

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

Rohn, Jim

12.

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

13.

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

Locke, John

14.

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

Tupper, Martin

15.

Books are not absolutely dead things, but do contain a certain potency of life in them, to be as active as the soul whose progeny they are; they preserve, as in a vial, the purest efficacy and extraction of the living intellect that bred them.

Milton, John

16.

Books are the blessed chloroform of the mind.

Chambers, Robert

17.

The book to read is not the one which thinks for you, but the one which makes you think. No book in the world equals the Bible for that.

Mccosh

18.

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

Byron, Lord

19.

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

20.

I used to walk to school with my nose buried in a book.

Coolio

21.

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

22.

The power of a text is different when it is read from when it is copied out. Only the copied text thus commands the soul of him who is occupied with it, whereas the mere reader never discovers the new aspects of his inner self that are opened by the text, that road cut through the interior jungle forever closing behind it: because the reader follows the movement of his mind in the free flight of day-dreaming, whereas the copier submits it to command.

Benjamin, Walter

23.

An empty book is like an infant's soul, in which anything may be written. It is capable of all things, but containeth nothing. I have a mind to fill this with profitable wonders.

Traherne, Thomas

24.

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

Jackson, Holbrook

25.

Books and marriage go ill together.

Moliere

26.

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

Lichtenberg, Georg C.

27.

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

Critchfield, Jim

28.

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.

29.

A person who publishes a book appears willfully in public with his pants down.

Millay, Edna St. Vincent

30.

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

Dane, Frank

31.

A book worth reading is worth buying.

Ruskin, John

32.

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.

33.

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

Twain, Mark

34.

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

Lowell, James Russell

35.

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

36.

'Tis pleasant, sure, to see one's name in print; A book's a book, although there's nothing in it.

Byron, Lord

37.

Readers are plentiful: thinkers are rare.

Martineau, Harriet

38.

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

Leacock, Stephen B.

39.

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

40.

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

41.

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

Faulkner, William

42.

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

Proverb, American

43.

What we become depends on what we read after all the professors have finished with us. The greatest university of all is the collection of books.

Carlyle, Thomas

44.

What is important is not to be able to read rapidly, but to be able to decide what not to read.

Mccay, James T.

45.

Today a reader, tomorrow a leader.

Fusselman, W.

46.

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

Schopenhauer, Arthur

47.

Tradition is but a meteor, which, if it once falls, cannot be rekindled. Memory, once interrupted, is not to be recalled. But written learning is a fixed luminary, which, after the cloud that had hidden it has passed away, is again bright in its proper station. So books are faithful repositories, which may be awhile neglected or forgotten, but when opened again, will again impart instruction.

Johnson

48.

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

Murray, William

49.

Our high respect for a well read person is praise enough for literature.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

50.

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

Carlyle, Thomas