Motivational Quotes

Books - reading

I can't bear art that you can walk round and admire. A book should be either a bandit or a rebel or a man in the crowd.

- Lawrence, D. H.

Best Quotes about Books - reading

Only a generation of readers will span a generation of writers.

Spielberg, Steven

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

Brown, Les

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

Gibbon, Edward

What is the most precious, the most exciting smell awaiting you in the house when you return to it after a dozen years or so? The smell of roses, you think? No, moldering books.

Sinyavsky, Andre

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

Disraeli, Benjamin

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

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

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

Wesley, John

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

10.

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

11.

Fiction reveals truth that reality obscures.

West, Jessamyn

12.

All good books are alike in that they are truer than if they had really happened and after you are finished reading one you will feel that all that happened to you and afterwards it all belongs to you; the good and the bad, the ecstasy, the remorse, and sorrow, the people and the places and how the weather was.

Hemingway, Ernest

13.

How can you dare teach a man to read until you've taught him everything else first?

Shaw, George Bernard

14.

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.

15.

You've really got to start hitting the books because it's no joke out here.

Lee, Spike

16.

A book worth reading is worth buying.

Ruskin, John

17.

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

Lichtenberg, Georg C.

18.

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

Belloc, Hilaire

19.

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.

20.

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

Forster, Edward M.

21.

The books one has written in the past have two surprises in store: one couldn't write them again, and wouldn't want to.

Rostand, Jean

22.

Books are lighthouses erected in the great sea of time.

Whipple, Edwin P.

23.

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

24.

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

25.

The multitude of books is a great evil. There is no limit to this fever for writing.

Luther, Martin

26.

Readers are plentiful: thinkers are rare.

Martineau, Harriet

27.

A book might be written on the injustice of the just.

Hope, Anthony

28.

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

29.

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

Pascal, Blaise

30.

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

31.

It is from books that wise people derive consolation in the troubles of life.

Hugo, Victor

32.

This book is not to be tossed lightly aside, but to be hurled with great force.

Parker, Dorothy

33.

A good title is the title of a successful book.

Chandler, Raymond

34.

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

Forster, Edward M.

35.

Books succeed, and lives fail.

Browning, Elizabeth Barrett

36.

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

37.

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

38.

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

39.

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.

40.

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

Mccay, James T.

41.

I wish I could write a beautiful book to break those hearts that are soon to cease to exist: a book of faith and small neat worlds and of people who live by the philosophies of popular songs.

42.

Much reading is an oppression of the mind, and extinguishes the natural candle, which is the reason of so many senseless scholars in the world.

Penn, William

43.

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

Baker, Nicholson

44.

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.

45.

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

Mallarme, Stephane

46.

The books one reads in childhood, and perhaps most of all the bad and good bad books, create in one's mind a sort of false map of the world, a series of fabulous countries into which one can retreat at odd moments throughout the rest of life, and which in some cases can survive a visit to the real countries which they are supposed to represent.

Orwell, George

47.

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

48.

There is creative reading as well as creative writing.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

49.

Books are the blessed chloroform of the mind.

Chambers, Robert

50.

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.