Motivational Quotes

Books - reading

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

- Lichtenberg, Georg C.

Best Quotes about Books - reading

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

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

Coolio

I am not a speed reader. I am a speed understander.

Asimov, Isaac

Begin to read a book that will help you move toward your dream.

Brown, Les

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

Montagu, Lady Mary Wortley

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

Adler, Mortimer J.

Books are not men and yet they stay alive.

Benet, Stephen Vincent

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

Lee, Harper

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

10.

If a book comes from the heart it will contrive to reach other hearts. All art and author craft are of small account to that.

Carlyle, Thomas

11.

I suggest that the only books that influence us are those for which we are ready, and which have gone a little further down our particular path than we have yet got ourselves.

Forster, Edward M.

12.

It does not follow because many books are written by persons born in America that there exists an American literature. Books which imitate or represent the thoughts and life of Europe do not constitute an American literature. Before such can exist, an original idea must animate this nation and fresh currents of life must call into life fresh thoughts along the shore.

Fuller, Margaret

13.

In science, read by preference the newest works. In literature, read the oldest. The classics are always modern.

Lytton, Lord Edward

14.

My books are water; those of the great geniuses are wine -- everybody drinks water.

Twain, Mark

15.

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

Descartes, Rene

16.

Books and marriage go ill together.

Moliere

17.

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

Locke, John

18.

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

Mallarme, Stephane

19.

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

20.

Books, like friends, should be few and well chosen. Like friends, too, we should return to them again and again for, like true friends, they will never fail us -- never cease to instruct -- never cloy.

Colton, Charles Caleb

21.

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

Chesterton, Gilbert K.

22.

To read too many books is harmful.

Zedong, Mao

23.

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

Baker, Nicholson

24.

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

Barrett, E.S.

25.

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

Trollope, Anthony

26.

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

Voltaire

27.

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

Fuller, Margaret

28.

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

29.

An empty book is like an infant's soul, in which anything may be written. It is capable of all things, but containeth nothing. I have a mind to fill this with profitable wonders.

Traherne, Thomas

30.

There is no robber worse than a bad book.

Proverb, Italian

31.

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

32.

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

33.

He that loves a book will never want a faithful friend, a wholesome counselor, a cheerful companion, an effectual comforter. By study, by reading, by thinking, one may innocently divert and pleasantly entertain himself, as in all weathers, as in all fortunes.

Barrow

34.

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

Carey, Joyce

35.

Much reading is an oppression of the mind, and extinguishes the natural candle, which is the reason of so many senseless scholars in the world.

Penn, William

36.

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

37.

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

Jackson, Holbrook

38.

Read Homer once, and you can read no more. For all books else appear so mean, and so poor. Verse will seem prose; but still persist to read, and Homer will be all the books you need.

Buckingham, Duke of

39.

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

40.

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

Chappell, Warren

41.

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

Erasmus, Desiderius

42.

Books are the blessed chloroform of the mind.

Chambers, Robert

43.

The reason that fiction is more interesting than any other form of literature, to those who really like to study people, is that in fiction the author can really tell the truth without humiliating himself.

Roosevelt, Eleanor

44.

The words of my book nothing, the drift of it everything.

Whitman, Walt

45.

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

Forster, Edward M.

46.

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

47.

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

48.

Books are masters who instruct us without rods or ferules, without words or anger, without bread or money. If you approach them, they are not asleep; if you seek them, they do not hide; if you blunder, they do not scold; if you are ignorant, they do not laugh at you.

Bury, Richard De

49.

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

Disraeli, Benjamin

50.

You are wise, witty and wonderful, but you spend too much time reading this sort of stuff.

Critchfield, Jim