Motivational Quotes

Books - reading

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

Best Quotes about Books - reading

Digressions, incontestably, are the sunshine; they are the life, the soul of reading! Take them out of this book, for instance, --you might as well take the book along with them; --one cold external winter would reign in every page of it; restore them to the writer; --he steps forth like a bridegroom, --bids All-hail; brings in variety, and forbids the appetite to fail.

Sterne, Laurence

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

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

In science, read by preference the newest works. In literature, read the oldest. The classics are always modern.

Lytton, Lord Edward

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

I am what libraries and librarians have made me, with little assistance from a professor of Greek and poets.

Sandwell, B. K.

There is no robber worse than a bad book.

Proverb, Italian

Reading is to the mind what exercise is to the body. It is wholesome and bracing for the mind to have its faculties kept on the stretch.

Steele, Sir Richard

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

Channing, William Ellery

10.

What is a diary as a rule? A document useful to the person who keeps it. Dull to the contemporary who reads it and invaluable to the student, centuries afterwards, who treasures it.

Terry, Helen

11.

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

Bulwer-Lytton, Edward G.

12.

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

Lowell, James Russell

13.

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.

14.

I suggest that the only books that influence us are those for which we are ready, and which have gone a little further down our particular path than we have yet got ourselves.

Forster, Edward M.

15.

Reading is a basic tool in the living of a good life.

Adler, Mortimer J.

16.

Beware you be not swallowed up in books! An ounce of love is worth a pound of knowledge.

Wesley, John

17.

A man ought to read just as his inclination leads him; for what he reads as a task will do him little good.

Johnson, Samuel

18.

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

Carlyle, Thomas

19.

Ideally a book would have no order to it, and the reader would have to discover his own.

Vaneigem, Raoul

20.

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

Leacock, Stephen B.

21.

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

Jackson, Holbrook

22.

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

23.

Books had instant replay long before televised sports.

Williams, Bert

24.

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

Schopenhauer, Arthur

25.

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

Wycherley, William

26.

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

27.

I feel like I'm drowning. Every night, I'm carrying home loads of things to read but I'm too exhausted. I keep clipping things and Xeroxing them and planning to read them eventually, but I just end up throwing it all away and feeling guilty.

Levine, Ghita

28.

I feel a kind of reverence for the first books of young authors. There is so much aspiration in them, so much audacious hope and trembling fear, so much of the heart's history, that all errors and shortcomings are for a while lost sight of in the amiable self assertion of youth.

Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth

29.

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

Mccay, James T.

30.

The books that everybody admires are those that nobody reads.

France, Anatole

31.

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

Proverb, American

32.

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

Lichtenberg, Georg C.

33.

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

Phelps, William Lyon

34.

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

35.

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

36.

All the best stories in the world are but one story in reality -- the story of escape. It is the only thing which interests us all and at all times, how to escape.

Benson, Arthur Christopher

37.

When a book raises your spirit, and inspires you with noble and manly thoughts, seek for no other test of its excellence. It is good, and made by a good workman.

Bruyere, Jean De La

38.

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.

39.

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

40.

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

Locke, John

41.

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

42.

Then I though of reading -- the nice and subtle happiness of reading ... this joy not dulled by age, this polite and unpunishable vice, this selfish, serene, lifelong intoxication.

Smith, Logan Pearsall

43.

There is creative reading as well as creative writing.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

44.

A novel is a mirror carried along a main road.

Stendhal, Henri B.

45.

In the case of good books, the point is not how many of them you can get through, but rather how many can get through to you.

Adler, Mortimer J.

46.

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

47.

A good book is the very essence of a good man. His virtues survive in it, while the foibles and faults of his actual life are forgotten. All the goodly company of the excellent and great sit around my table, or look down on me from yonder shelves, waiting patiently to answer my questions and enrich me with their wisdom. A precious book is a foretaste of immortality.

Cuyler, Theodore L.

48.

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

49.

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

Wilde, Oscar

50.

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