Motivational Quotes

Books - reading

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

Best Quotes about Books - reading

All my good reading, you might say, was done in the toilet. There are passages in Ulysses which can be read only in the toilet -- if one wants to extract the full flavor of their content.

Miller, Henry

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

Ruskin, John

The unread story is not a story; it is little black marks on wood pulp. The reader, reading it, makes it live: a live thing, a story.

Guin, Ursula K. Le

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

Vaneigem, Raoul

Readers are plentiful: thinkers are rare.

Martineau, Harriet

After all manner of professors have done their best for us, the place we are to get knowledge is in books. The true university of these days is a collection of books.

Carlyle, Thomas

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

Lowell, James Russell

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

Today a reader, tomorrow a leader.

Fusselman, W.

10.

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.

11.

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

Harington, John

12.

We should be as careful of the books we read, as of the company we keep. The dead very often have more power than the living.

Edwards, Tryon

13.

There are two kinds of books. Those that no one reads and those that no one ought to read.

Mencken, H. L.

14.

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

Baker, Nicholson

15.

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

Jackson, Holbrook

16.

The most foolish kind of a book is a kind of leaky boat on the sea of wisdom; some of the wisdom will get in anyhow.

Holmes, Oliver Wendell

17.

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

18.

Reading makes immigrants of us all. It takes us away from home, but more important, it finds homes for us everywhere.

Rochman, Hazel

19.

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

Adler, Mortimer J.

20.

Read nothing that you do not care to remember, and remember nothing you do not mean to use.

Blackie, Professor

21.

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

22.

Next, in importance to books are their titles.

Davies, Paul

23.

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

Mccay, James T.

24.

There is a set of religious, or rather moral, writings which teach that virtue is the certain road to happiness, and vice to misery in this world. A very wholesome and comfortable doctrine, and to which we have but one objection, namely, that it is not true.

Fielding, Henry

25.

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

Descartes, Rene

26.

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

27.

Hypocrite reader -- my fellow -- my brother!

Baudelaire, Charles

28.

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

Hadas, Moses

29.

To read well, that is, to read true books in a true spirit, is a noble exercise, and one that will task the reader more than any other exercise which the customs of the day esteem. It requires a training such as the athletes underwent, the steady intention almost of the whole life to this object.

Thoreau, Henry David

30.

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

Belloc, Hilaire

31.

A library is thought in cold storage.

Samuel, Herbert

32.

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

33.

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

34.

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

Lee, Harper

35.

Books had instant replay long before televised sports.

Williams, Bert

36.

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

Schopenhauer, Arthur

37.

To read too many books is harmful.

Zedong, Mao

38.

You will find most books worth reading are worth reading twice.

Morely, John

39.

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

Mcluhan, Marshall

40.

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

Joubert, Joseph

41.

No story is the same to us after a lapse of time; or rather we who read it are no longer the same interpreters.

Eliot, George

42.

The world of books is the most remarkable creation of man nothing else that he builds ever lasts monuments fall; nations perish; civilization grow old and die out; new races build others. But in the world of books are volumes that have seen this happen again and again and yet live on. Still young, still as fresh as the day they were written, still telling men's hearts, of the hearts of men centuries dead.

Day, Clarence

43.

What we become depends on what we read after all the professors have finished with us. The greatest university of all is the collection of books.

Carlyle, Thomas

44.

Book love... is your pass to the greatest, the purest, and the most perfect pleasure that God has prepared for His creatures.

Trollope, Anthony

45.

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

Bulwer-Lytton, Edward G.

46.

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

47.

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

Brodsky, Joseph

48.

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

49.

Books, books, books had found the secret of a garret-room piled high with cases in my father's name; Piled high, packed large, --where, creeping in and out among the giant fossils of my past, like some small nimble mouse between the ribs of a mastodon, I nibbled here and there at this or that box, pulling through the gap, in heats of terror, haste, victorious joy, the first book first. And how I felt it beat under my pillow, in the morning's dark. An hour before the sun would let me read! My books!

Browning, Elizabeth Barrett

50.

What is reading, but silent conversation.

Landor, Walter Savage