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

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

Vaneigem, Raoul

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

When I get a little money, I buy books; and if any is left I buy food and clothes.

Erasmus, Desiderius

A book that is shut is but a block.

Fuller, Thomas

Prerequisite for rereadability in books: that they be forgettable.

Rostand, Jean

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

Baker, Nicholson

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

Byron, Lord

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

Lowell, James Russell

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

Coolio

10.

The man who does not read books has no advantage over the man that can not read them.

Twain, Mark

11.

The books that everybody admires are those that nobody reads.

France, Anatole

12.

Of all the ways of acquiring books, writing them oneself is regarded as the most praiseworthy method. Writers are really people who write books not because they are poor, but because they are dissatisfied with the books which they could buy but do not like.

Benjamin, Walter

13.

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

Lichtenberg, Georg C.

14.

The book you don't read won't help.

Rohn, Jim

15.

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''

16.

A multitude of books distracts the mind.

Socrates

17.

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

Mccay, James T.

18.

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

19.

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

20.

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

21.

No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader.

Frost, Robert

22.

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

23.

The failure to read good books both enfeebles the vision and strengthens our most fatal tendency --the belief that the here and now is all there is.

Bloom, Allan

24.

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

Wesley, John

25.

The newest books are those that never grow old.

Jackson, George Holbrook

26.

To sit alone in the lamplight with a book spread out before you hold intimate converse with men of unseen generations -- such is pleasure beyond compare.

Kenko, Yoshida

27.

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

Carey, Joyce

28.

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

29.

All the known world, excepting only savage nations, is governed by books.

Voltaire

30.

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

Wycherley, William

31.

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

Adler, Mortimer J.

32.

The great American novel has not only already been written, it has already been rejected.

Dane, Frank

33.

A book may be compared to your neighbor: if it be good, it cannot last too long; if bad, you cannot get rid of it too early.

Brooke, Rupert

34.

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

Hope, Anthony

35.

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

Ruskin, John

36.

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

Spielberg, Steven

37.

The tools I need for my work are paper, tobacco, food, and a little whiskey.

Faulkner, William

38.

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.

39.

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.

40.

I always begin at the left with the opening word of the sentence and read toward the right and I recommend this method.

Thurber, James

41.

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

42.

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

43.

What gunpowder did for war the printing press has done for the mind.

Phillips, Wendell

44.

The real risks for any artist are taken in pushing the work to the limits of what is possible, in the attempt to increase the sum of what it is possible to think. Books become good when they go to this edge and risk falling over it --when they endanger the artist by reason of what he has, or has not, artistically dared.

Rushdie, Salman

45.

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

Byron, Lord

46.

When you reread a classic, you do not see more in the book than you did before; you see more in you than there was before.

Fadiman, Clifton

47.

Books are men of higher stature; the only men that speak aloud for future times to hear.

Barrett, E.S.

48.

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