Motivational Quotes

Books - reading

A vacuum of ideas affects people differently than a vacuum of air, otherwise readers of books would be constantly collapsing.

- Lichtenberg, Georg C.

Best Quotes about Books - reading

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

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

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

Carey, Joyce

Next to acquiring good friends, the best acquisition is that of good books.

Colton, Charles Caleb

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

In the case of good books, the point is not how many of them you can get through, but rather how many can get through to you.

Adler, Mortimer J.

This book is not to be tossed lightly aside, but to be hurled with great force.

Parker, Dorothy

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.

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

10.

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

11.

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

12.

A vacuum of ideas affects people differently than a vacuum of air, otherwise readers of books would be constantly collapsing.

Lichtenberg, Georg C.

13.

Books are those faithful mirrors that reflect to our mind the minds of sages and heroes.

Gibbon, Edward

14.

No furniture is so charming as books.

Smith, Sydney

15.

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

Temple, Sir William

16.

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

Hunt, Leigh

17.

A multitude of books distracts the mind.

Socrates

18.

As writers become more numerous, it is natural for readers to become more indolent; whence must necessarily arise a desire of attaining knowledge with the greatest possible ease.

Goldsmith, Oliver

19.

A book that is shut is but a block.

Fuller, Thomas

20.

The books one has written in the past have two surprises in store: one couldn't write them again, and wouldn't want to.

Rostand, Jean

21.

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

22.

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

Brodsky, Joseph

23.

There was a time when the world acted on books; now books act on the world.

Joubert, Joseph

24.

To use books rightly, is to go to them for help; to appeal to them when our own knowledge and power fail; to be led by them into wider sight and purer conception than our own, and to receive from them the united sentence of the judges and councils of all time, against our solitary and unstable opinions.

Ruskin, John

25.

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

Voltaire

26.

People are much more willing to lend you books than bookcases.

Twain, Mark

27.

A book is a part of life, a manifestation of life, just as much as a tree or a horse or a star. It obeys its own rhythms, its own laws, whether it be a novel, a play, or a diary. The deep, hidden rhythm of life is always there -- that of the pulse, the heart beat.

Miller, Henry

28.

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

29.

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.

30.

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.

31.

Books are the blessed chloroform of the mind.

Chambers, Robert

32.

Don't just read the easy stuff. You may be entertained by it, but you will never grow from it.

Rohn, Jim

33.

The mortality of all inanimate things is terrible to me, but that of books most of all.

Howells, William Dean

34.

Reading makes immigrants of us all. It takes us away from home, but more important, it finds homes for us everywhere.

Rochman, Hazel

35.

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

36.

The best effect of any book, is that it excites the reader to self-activity.

Carlyle, Thomas

37.

Reading the Scriptures is an uplifting experience.

38.

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

39.

Hypocrite reader -- my fellow -- my brother!

Baudelaire, Charles

40.

A good book is the best of friends, the same today and for ever.

Tupper, Martin

41.

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

42.

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

43.

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

Lee, Harper

44.

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

Montagu, Lady Mary Wortley

45.

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

Hood, Thomas

46.

There is a set of religious, or rather moral, writings which teach that virtue is the certain road to happiness, and vice to misery in this world. A very wholesome and comfortable doctrine, and to which we have but one objection, namely, that it is not true.

Fielding, Henry

47.

One sheds one's sicknesses in books -- repeats and presents again one's emotions, to be master of them.

Lawrence, D. H.

48.

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

Gibbon, Edward

49.

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

50.

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