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

I would sooner read a timetable or a catalog than nothing at all.

Maugham, W. Somerset

Everywhere I have sought rest and not found it, except sitting in a corner by myself with a little book.

Kempis, Thomas

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

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

Disraeli, Benjamin

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

When you have mastered numbers, you will in fact no longer be reading numbers, any more than you read words when reading books You will be reading meanings.

Geneen, Harold S.

Readers are plentiful: thinkers are rare.

Martineau, Harriet

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.

Books are the blessed chloroform of the mind.

Chambers, Robert

10.

Without books the development of civilization would have been impossible. They are the engines of change, windows on the world, Lighthouses as the poet said erected in the sea of time. They are companions, teachers, magicians, bankers of the treasures of the mind, Books are humanity in print.

Schopenhauer, Arthur

11.

She could give herself up to the written word as naturally as a good dancer to music or a fine swimmer to water. The only difficulty was that after finishing the last sentence she was left with a feeling at once hollow and uncomfortably full. Exactly like indigestion.

Rhys, Jean

12.

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

Phelps, William Lyon

13.

A novel is never anything, but a philosophy put into images.

Camus, Albert

14.

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

Hadas, Moses

15.

A big leather-bound volume makes an ideal razor strap. A thin book is useful to stick under a table with a broken caster to steady it. A large, flat atlas can be used to cover a window with a broken pane. And a thick, old-fashioned heavy book with a clasp is the finest thing in the world to throw at a noisy cat.

Twain, Mark

16.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

17.

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

Secondat, Charles de

18.

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

19.

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

Chesterton, Gilbert K.

20.

The things I want to know are in books; my best friend is the man who'll get me a book I ain't read.

Lincoln, Abraham

21.

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

22.

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.

23.

All the best stories in the world are but one story in reality -- the story of escape. It is the only thing which interests us all and at all times, how to escape.

Benson, Arthur Christopher

24.

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

Hope, Anthony

25.

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

26.

Most books, like their authors, are born to die; of only a few books can it be said that death has no dominion over them; they live, and their influence lives forever.

Swartz, J.

27.

Once we have learned to read, meaning of words can somehow register without consciousness.

Marcel, Anthony

28.

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

Morely, John

29.

A dose of poison can do its work but once. A bad book can go on poisoning minds for generations.

Murray, William

30.

A bad book is as much of a labor to write as a good one; it comes as sincerely from the author's soul.

Huxley, Aldous

31.

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

32.

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

33.

A house without books is like a room without windows. No man has a right to bring up his children without surrounding them with books, if he has the means to buy them. It is a wrong to his family. Children learn to read by being in the presence of books. The love of knowledge comes with reading and grows upon it. And the love of knowledge, in a young mind, is almost always a warrant against the inferior excitement of passions and vices.

Mann, Horace

34.

There is no robber worse than a bad book.

Proverb, Italian

35.

It is books that teach us to refine our pleasures when young, and to recall them with satisfaction when we are old.

Hunt, Leigh

36.

Reading a book is like re-writing it for yourself. You bring to a novel, anything you read, all your experience of the world. You bring your history and you read it in your own terms.

Carter, Angela

37.

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.

38.

Miss a meal if you have to, but don't miss a book.

Rohn, Jim

39.

Some of the most famous books are the least worth reading. Their fame was due to their having done something that needed to be doing in their day. The work is done and the virtue of the book has expired.

Morely, John

40.

I can't bear art that you can walk round and admire. A book should be either a bandit or a rebel or a man in the crowd.

Lawrence, D. H.

41.

It is from books that wise people derive consolation in the troubles of life.

Hugo, Victor

42.

To read too many books is harmful.

Zedong, Mao

43.

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

44.

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

Hood, Thomas

45.

The newest books are those that never grow old.

Jackson, George Holbrook

46.

A wicked book cannot repent.

Proverb

47.

God be thanked for books; they are the voices of the distant and the dead, and make us heirs of the spiritual life of past ages.

Channing, William Ellery

48.

I feel a kind of reverence for the first books of young authors. There is so much aspiration in them, so much audacious hope and trembling fear, so much of the heart's history, that all errors and shortcomings are for a while lost sight of in the amiable self assertion of youth.

Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth

49.

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

50.

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

Lytton, Lord Edward