Motivational Quotes

Books - reading

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

Best Quotes about Books - reading

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

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

Schopenhauer, Arthur

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

Hood, Thomas

No furniture is so charming as books.

Smith, Sydney

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.

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

Maclennan, Hugh

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

Education... has produced a vast population able to read but unable to distinguish what is worth reading, an easy prey to sensations and cheap appeals.

Trevelyan, G. M.

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

Ruskin, John

10.

The age of the book is almost gone.

Steiner, George

11.

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

12.

Read good, big important things.

Noonan, Peggy

13.

I wish I could write a beautiful book to break those hearts that are soon to cease to exist: a book of faith and small neat worlds and of people who live by the philosophies of popular songs.

14.

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

Jackson, Holbrook

15.

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

Mcluhan, Marshall

16.

What is the most precious, the most exciting smell awaiting you in the house when you return to it after a dozen years or so? The smell of roses, you think? No, moldering books.

Sinyavsky, Andre

17.

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

Auden, W. H.

18.

Books are lighthouses erected in the great sea of time.

Whipple, Edwin P.

19.

In any situation, ask yourself: What strengths do I possess that can contribute towards accomplishing something in this situation? Then follow through.

20.

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

Disraeli, Benjamin

21.

The books that the world calls immoral are the books that show the world its own shame.

Wilde, Oscar

22.

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

Mccay, James T.

23.

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

Mencken, H. L.

24.

The lessons taught in great books are misleading. The commerce in life is rarely so simple and never so just.

Brookner, Anita

25.

The last thing one discovers in composing a work is what to put first.

Pascal, Blaise

26.

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

27.

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

Rohn, Jim

28.

With one day's reading a man may have the key in his hands.

Pound, Ezra

29.

Somewhere, everywhere, now hidden, now apparent in what ever is written down, is the form of a human being. If we seek to know him, are we idly occupied?

Woolf, Virginia

30.

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.

31.

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

32.

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

33.

Every abridgement of a good book is a fool abridged.

Montaigne, Michel Eyquem De

34.

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

35.

One half who graduate from college never read another book.

True, Herbert

36.

To read too many books is harmful.

Zedong, Mao

37.

The greatest gift is the passion for reading. It is cheap, it consoles, it distracts, it excites, it gives you knowledge of the world and experience of a wide kind. It is a moral illumination.

Hardwick, Elizabeth

38.

The good parts of a book may be only something a writer is lucky enough to overhear or it may be the wreck of his whole damn life --and one is as good as the other.

Hemingway, Ernest

39.

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

40.

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

Locke, John

41.

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.

42.

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

Phelps, William Lyon

43.

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

44.

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

45.

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

Hadas, Moses

46.

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

Forster, Edward M.

47.

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

48.

Reading the Scriptures is an uplifting experience.

49.

There is no robber worse than a bad book.

Proverb, Italian

50.

Except a living man there is nothing more wonderful than a book! a message to us from the dead -- from human souls we never saw, who lived, perhaps, thousands of miles away. And yet these, in those little sheets of paper, speak to us, arouse us, terrify us, teach us, comfort us, open their hearts to us as brothers.

Kingsley, Charles