Motivational Quotes

Books - reading

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

- Leacock, Stephen B.

Best Quotes about Books - reading

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

Sandwell, B. K.

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

Spielberg, Steven

I always like to look on the optimistic side of life, but I am realistic enough to know that life is a complex matter.

Disney, Walt

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

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

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

Phelps, William Lyon

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

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

Byron, Lord

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

10.

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

11.

A good title is the title of a successful book.

Chandler, Raymond

12.

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

13.

One sheds one's sicknesses in books -- repeats and presents again one's emotions, to be master of them.

Lawrence, D. H.

14.

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

15.

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

16.

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

Murray, William

17.

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

Milton, John

18.

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

Coolio

19.

The Bible remained for me a book of books, still divine -- but divine in the sense that all great books are divine which teach men how to live righteously.

Keith, Sir Arthur

20.

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

Rohn, Jim

21.

A book that is shut is but a block.

Fuller, Thomas

22.

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

Wesley, John

23.

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

Pound, Ezra

24.

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

25.

A novel must be exceptionally good to live as long as the average cat.

Maclennan, Hugh

26.

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

Ruskin, John

27.

When you have mastered numbers, you will in fact no longer be reading numbers, any more than you read words when reading books You will be reading meanings.

Geneen, Harold S.

28.

It is books that teach us to refine our pleasures when young, and to recall them with satisfaction when we are old.

Hunt, Leigh

29.

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

30.

My books kept me from the ring, the dog-pit, the tavern, and the saloon.

Hood, Thomas

31.

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

32.

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''

33.

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

Brown, Les

34.

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

Forster, Edward M.

35.

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

36.

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

37.

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

Byron, Lord

38.

A book is a part of life, a manifestation of life, just as much as a tree or a horse or a star. It obeys its own rhythms, its own laws, whether it be a novel, a play, or a diary. The deep, hidden rhythm of life is always there -- that of the pulse, the heart beat.

Miller, Henry

39.

Thank you for sending me a copy of your book -- I'll waste no time reading it.

Hadas, Moses

40.

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

Mcluhan, Marshall

41.

The books that everybody admires are those that nobody reads.

France, Anatole

42.

Read good, big important things.

Noonan, Peggy

43.

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.

44.

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

45.

A novel is never anything, but a philosophy put into images.

Camus, Albert

46.

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

Auden, W. H.

47.

If I have not read a book before, it is, for all intents and purposes, new to me whether it was printed yesterday or three hundred years ago.

Hazlitt, William

48.

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