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

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

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

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

Descartes, Rene

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

Jackson, Holbrook

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

Mcluhan, Marshall

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

Carlyle, Thomas

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

Reading the Scriptures is an uplifting experience.

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

10.

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

Gibbon, Edward

11.

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

12.

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

13.

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

14.

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

Harington, John

15.

Books are lighthouses erected in the great sea of time.

Whipple, Edwin P.

16.

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

17.

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

Mencken, H. L.

18.

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

Tupper, Martin

19.

No entertainment is so cheap as reading, nor is any pleasure so lasting.

Montagu, Lady Mary Wortley

20.

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

21.

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

Maugham, W. Somerset

22.

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

Frost, Robert

23.

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

24.

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

25.

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

26.

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

27.

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

28.

If a book comes from the heart it will contrive to reach other hearts. All art and author craft are of small account to that.

Carlyle, Thomas

29.

Books are masters who instruct us without rods or ferules, without words or anger, without bread or money. If you approach them, they are not asleep; if you seek them, they do not hide; if you blunder, they do not scold; if you are ignorant, they do not laugh at you.

Bury, Richard De

30.

Five daily newspapers arrive in my California driveway. The New York times and the Wall Street Journal are supplemented by three local papers. As for magazines, I read, or at least skim, Business Week, Forbes, The Economist, INC; Industry Week, Fortune. Other subscriptions include Sales and Marketing Management, Modern Health Care, Progressive Grocer, High Tech Business, and Slaon Management Review from MIT. I religiously read Business Tokyo, Asia Week, and Far Eastern Economic Review. I glance at Newsweek and Time ... but I devour the New Republic, Policy Review, Foreign Affairs, The Washington Monthly, and Public Interest. How about books? A dozen or more each month.

Peters, Thomas J.

31.

Footnotes are the finer-suckered surfaces that allow testicular paragraphs to hold fast to the wider reality of the library.

Baker, Nicholson

32.

He had read much, if one considers his long life; but his contemplation was much more than his reading. He was wont to say that if he had read as much as other men he should have known no more than other men.

Aubrey, John

33.

When we read a story, we inhabit it. The covers of the book are like a roof and four walls. What is to happen next will take place within the four walls of the story. And this is possible because the story's voice makes everything its own.

Berger, John

34.

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

Auden, W. H.

35.

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

36.

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

37.

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

38.

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

39.

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

40.

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

Disraeli, Benjamin

41.

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

Trollope, Anthony

42.

Who kills a man kills a reasonable creature, God's image, but thee who destroys a good book, kills reason itself.

Milton, John

43.

Don't just read the easy stuff. You may be entertained by it, but you will never grow from it.

Rohn, Jim

44.

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

45.

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

46.

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

Byron, Lord

47.

It does not follow because many books are written by persons born in America that there exists an American literature. Books which imitate or represent the thoughts and life of Europe do not constitute an American literature. Before such can exist, an original idea must animate this nation and fresh currents of life must call into life fresh thoughts along the shore.

Fuller, Margaret

48.

Kirk, E.N.

49.

Don't ask me who's influenced me. A lion is made up of the lambs he's digested, and I've been reading all my life.

Seferis, Giorgos

50.

Happy is he who has laid up in his youth, and held fast in all fortune, a genuine and passionate love for reading.

Choate, Rufus