Motivational Quotes

Books - reading

Until I feared I would lose it, I never loved to read. One does not love breathing.

- Lee, Harper

Best Quotes about Books - reading

A book worth reading is worth buying.

Ruskin, John

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

Lytton, Lord Edward

Old books, you know well, are books of the world's youth, and new books are the fruits of its age.

Holmes, Oliver Wendell

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

Brown, Les

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

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

To read too many books is harmful.

Zedong, Mao

Many books require no thought from those who read them, and for a very simple reason: they made no such demand upon those who wrote them. Those works, therefore, are the most valuable, that set our thinking faculties in the fullest operation. understand them.

Clarendon

The pleasure of reading is doubled when one lives with another who shares the same books.

Mansfield, Katherine

10.

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

Hope, Anthony

11.

Reading a book is like re-writing it for yourself. You bring to a novel, anything you read, all your experience of the world. You bring your history and you read it in your own terms.

Carter, Angela

12.

The chief knowledge that a man gets from reading books is the knowledge that very few of them are worth reading.

Mencken, H. L.

13.

Once we have learned to read, meaning of words can somehow register without consciousness.

Marcel, Anthony

14.

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

Auden, W. H.

15.

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

16.

I know every book of mine by its smell, and I have but to put my nose between the pages to be reminded of all sorts of things.

Gissing, George Robert

17.

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

18.

Until I feared I would lose it, I never loved to read. One does not love breathing.

Lee, Harper

19.

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

Baker, Nicholson

20.

There are worse crimes than burning books. One of them is not reading them.

Brodsky, Joseph

21.

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

22.

To learn to read is to light a fire; every syllable that is spelled out is a spark.

Hugo, Victor

23.

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

Hadas, Moses

24.

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

Vaneigem, Raoul

25.

The age of the book is almost gone.

Steiner, George

26.

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

Forster, Edward M.

27.

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.

28.

Everything in this book may be wrong. [The Savior's Manual]

Bach, Richard

29.

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

Luther, Martin

30.

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

Disraeli, Benjamin

31.

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

32.

Readers are plentiful: thinkers are rare.

Martineau, Harriet

33.

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

34.

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

Tupper, Martin

35.

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

Montagu, Lady Mary Wortley

36.

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

Channing, William Ellery

37.

You should read books like you take medicine, by advice, and not by advertisement.

Ruskin, John

38.

Americans will listen, but they do not care to read. War and Peace must wait for the leisure of retirement, which never really comes: meanwhile it helps to furnish the living room. Blockbusting fiction is bought as furniture. Unread, it maintains its value. Read, it looks like money wasted. Cunningly, Americans know that books contain a person, and they want the person, not the book.

Burgess, Anthony

39.

After all, the world is not a stage -- not to me: nor a theatre: nor a show-house of any sort. And art, especially novels, are not little theatres where the reader sits aloft and watches... and sighs, commiserates, condones and smiles. That's what you want a book to be: because it leaves you so safe and superior, with your two-dollar ticket to the show. And that's what my books are not and never will be. Whoever reads me will be in the thick of the scrimmage, and if he doesn't like it -- if he wants a safe seat in the audience -- let him read someone else.

Lawrence, D. H.

40.

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.

41.

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

42.

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

Locke, John

43.

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

Milton, John

44.

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

Wycherley, William

45.

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

46.

The mortality of all inanimate things is terrible to me, but that of books most of all.

Howells, William Dean

47.

A novel points out that the world consists entirely of exceptions.

Carey, Joyce

48.

This will never be a civilized country until we expend more money for books than we do for chewing gum.

Hubbard, Elbert

49.

If a secret history of books could be written, and the author's private thoughts and meanings noted down alongside of his story, how many insipid volumes would become interesting, and dull tales excite the reader!

Thackeray, William M.

50.

Books are not men and yet they stay alive.

Benet, Stephen Vincent