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

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

Books are standing counselors and preachers, always at hand, and always disinterested; having this advantage over oral instructors, that they are ready to repeat their lesson as often as we please.

Chambers, Oswald

There was a time when the world acted on books; now books act on the world.

Joubert, Joseph

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

Descartes, Rene

The Brahmins say that in their books there are many predictions of times in which it will rain. But press those books as strongly as you can, you can not get out of them a drop of water. So you can not get out of all the books that contain the best precepts the smallest good deed.

Tolstoy, Count Leo

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

Books to judicious compilers, are useful; to particular arts and professions, they are absolutely necessary; to men of real science, they are tools: but more are tools to them.

Johnson

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.

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.

10.

How many a man has dated a new era in his life from the reading of a book! The book exists for us, perchance, that will explain our miracles and reveal new ones. The at present unutterable things we may find somewhere uttered.

Thoreau, Henry David

11.

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

12.

Books are the blessed chloroform of the mind.

Chambers, Robert

13.

A bad book is as much of a labor to write as a good one; it comes as sincerely from the author's soul.

Huxley, Aldous

14.

A house is not a home unless it contains food and fire for the mind as well as the body.

Fuller, Margaret

15.

Everywhere I have sought rest and not found it, except sitting in a corner by myself with a little book.

Kempis, Thomas

16.

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

17.

Books are not absolutely dead things, but do contain a certain potency of life in them, to be as active as the soul whose progeny they are; they preserve, as in a vial, the purest efficacy and extraction of the living intellect that bred them.

Milton, John

18.

A multitude of books distracts the mind.

Socrates

19.

To buy books would be a good thing if we also could buy the time to read them.

Schopenhauer, Arthur

20.

We are too civil to books. For a few golden sentences we will turn over and actually read a volume of four or five hundred pages.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

21.

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

Belloc, Hilaire

22.

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

Jackson, Holbrook

23.

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

24.

A bibliophile of little means is likely to suffer often. Books don't slip from his hands but fly past him through the air, high as birds, high as prices.

Neruda, Pablo

25.

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

Hugo, Victor

26.

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

Lichtenberg, Georg C.

27.

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

Pound, Ezra

28.

To feel most beautifully alive means to be reading something beautiful, ready always to apprehend in the flow of language the sudden flash of poetry.

Bachelard, Gaston

29.

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.

30.

Readers are plentiful: thinkers are rare.

Martineau, Harriet

31.

The books that everybody admires are those that nobody reads.

France, Anatole

32.

From the moment I picked your book up until I laid it down I was convulsed with laughter. Some day I intend reading it.

Marx, Groucho

33.

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

34.

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

Mcluhan, Marshall

35.

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

36.

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

Lichtenberg, Georg C.

37.

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

Marcel, Anthony

38.

Books are but waste paper unless we spend in action the wisdom we get from thought -- asleep. When we are weary of the living, we may repair to the dead, who have nothing of peevishness, pride, or design in their conversation.

Collier, Jeremy

39.

The mere brute pleasure of reading --the sort of pleasure a cow must have in grazing.

Chesterton, Gilbert K.

40.

A book that is shut is but a block.

Fuller, Thomas

41.

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

42.

No furniture is so charming as books.

Smith, Sydney

43.

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

Mallarme, Stephane

44.

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.

45.

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

46.

The things I want to know are in books; my best friend is the man who'll get me a book I ain't read.

Lincoln, Abraham

47.

A book is a mirror: If an ass peers into it, you can't expect an apostle to look out.

Lichtenberg, Georg C.

48.

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

Forster, Edward M.

49.

Fiction reveals truth that reality obscures.