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 books one reads in childhood, and perhaps most of all the bad and good bad books, create in one's mind a sort of false map of the world, a series of fabulous countries into which one can retreat at odd moments throughout the rest of life, and which in some cases can survive a visit to the real countries which they are supposed to represent.

Orwell, George

Tradition is but a meteor, which, if it once falls, cannot be rekindled. Memory, once interrupted, is not to be recalled. But written learning is a fixed luminary, which, after the cloud that had hidden it has passed away, is again bright in its proper station. So books are faithful repositories, which may be awhile neglected or forgotten, but when opened again, will again impart instruction.

Johnson

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

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

Locke, John

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

Mcluhan, Marshall

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

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

Brodsky, Joseph

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

Voltaire

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.

10.

The good of a book lies in its being read. A book is made up of signs that speak of other signs, which in their turn speak of things. Without an eye to read them, a book contains signs that produce no concepts; therefore it is dumb.

Eco, Umberto

11.

You will, I am sure, agree with me that... if page 534 only finds us in the second chapter, the length of the first one must have been really intolerable.

Doyle, Sir Arthur Conan

12.

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

13.

Next, in importance to books are their titles.

Davies, Paul

14.

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

15.

The reason a writer writes a book is to forget a book and the reason a reader reads one is to remember it.

Wolfe, Thomas

16.

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.

17.

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

Jackson, Holbrook

18.

Levine, Ghita

19.

Books are lighthouses erected in the great sea of time.

Whipple, Edwin P.

20.

The book salesman should be honored because he brings to our attention, as a rule, the very books we need most and neglect most.

Crane, Frank

21.

There is creative reading as well as creative writing.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

22.

Most books today seemed to have been written overnight from books read the day before.

Chamfort, Sebastien-Roch Nicolas De

23.

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

24.

Books are the blessed chloroform of the mind.

Chambers, Robert

25.

Some books leave us free and some books make us free.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

26.

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

27.

The world may be full of fourth-rate writers but it's also full of fourth-rate readers.

Barstow, Stan

28.

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

29.

The flood of print has turned reading into a process of gulping rather than savoring

Chappell, Warren

30.

The constant habit of perusing devout books is so indispensable, that it has been termed the oil of the lamp of prayer. Too much reading, however, and too little meditation, may produce the effect of a lamp inverted; which is extinguished by the very excess of that ailment, whose property is to feed it.

More, Hannah

31.

There is no robber worse than a bad book.

Proverb, Italian

32.

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

33.

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

34.

I've never know any trouble than an hour's reading didn't assuage.

Secondat, Charles de

35.

My early and invincible love of reading I would not exchange for all the riches of India.

Gibbon, Edward

36.

One half who graduate from college never read another book.

True, Herbert

37.

Who ever converses among old books will be hard to please among the new.

Temple, Sir William

38.

Fiction reveals truth that reality obscures.

West, Jessamyn

39.

Reading the Scriptures is an uplifting experience.

40.

A good title is the title of a successful book.

Chandler, Raymond

41.

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

Barrett, E.S.

42.

A person of mature years and ripe development, who is expecting nothing from literature but the corroboration and renewal of past ideas, may find satisfaction in a lucidity so complete as to occasion no imaginative excitement, but young and ambitious students are not content with it. They seek the excitement because they are capable of the growth that it accompanies.

Cooley, Charles Horton

43.

What is reading, but silent conversation.

Landor, Walter Savage

44.

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

45.

To read too many books is harmful.

Zedong, Mao

46.

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

47.

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

Montagu, Lady Mary Wortley

48.

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

49.

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

50.

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