Motivational Quotes

Books - reading

There are very many people who read simply to prevent themselves from thinking.

- Lichtenberg, Georg C.

Best Quotes about Books - reading

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

Rohn, Jim

Who kills a man kills a reasonable creature, God's image, but thee who destroys a good book, kills reason itself.

Milton, John

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

Wilde, Oscar

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

Hadas, Moses

Next, in importance to books are their titles.

Davies, Paul

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

Books had instant replay long before televised sports.

Williams, Bert

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

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

Mallarme, Stephane

10.

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

Jackson, Holbrook

11.

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

12.

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

13.

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

Asimov, Isaac

14.

Any book that helps a child to form a habit of reading, to make reading one of his deep and continuing needs, is good for him.

McKenna, Richard

15.

He has only half learned the art of reading who has not added to it the more refined art of skipping and skimming.

Balfour, Arthur James

16.

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

17.

Surviving and thriving as a professional today demands two new approaches to the written word. First, it requires a new approach to orchestrating information, by skillfully choosing what to read and what to ignore. Second, it requires a new approach to integrating information, by reading faster and with greater comprehension.

Calano, Jimmy

18.

Books are the blessed chloroform of the mind.

Chambers, Robert

19.

A novel is a mirror carried along a main road.

Stendhal, Henri B.

20.

A conventional good read is usually a bad read, a relaxing bath in what we know already. A true good read is surely an act of innovative creation in which we, the readers, become conspirators.

Bradbury, Malcolm

21.

Many books require no thought from those who read them, and for a very simple reason: they made no such demand upon those who wrote them. Those works, therefore, are the most valuable, that set our thinking faculties in the fullest operation. understand them.

Clarendon

22.

The oldest books are still only just out to those who have not read them.

Butler, Samuel

23.

What we become depends on what we read after all the professors have finished with us. The greatest university of all is the collection of books.

Carlyle, Thomas

24.

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.

25.

There is creative reading as well as creative writing.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

26.

When we read a story, we inhabit it. The covers of the book are like a roof and four walls. What is to happen next will take place within the four walls of the story. And this is possible because the story's voice makes everything its own.

Berger, John

27.

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

Maclennan, Hugh

28.

A library is thought in cold storage.

Samuel, Herbert

29.

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

Temple, Sir William

30.

Our high respect for a well read person is praise enough for literature.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

31.

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

Howells, William Dean

32.

No story is the same to us after a lapse of time; or rather we who read it are no longer the same interpreters.

Eliot, George

33.

I am a part of everything that I have read.

Kieran, John

34.

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.

35.

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

36.

How can you dare teach a man to read until you've taught him everything else first?

Shaw, George Bernard

37.

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

Marcel, Anthony

38.

The pleasure of reading is doubled when one lives with another who shares the same books.

Mansfield, Katherine

39.

To read too many books is harmful.

Zedong, Mao

40.

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

Hugo, Victor

41.

A person who publishes a book appears willfully in public with his pants down.

Millay, Edna St. Vincent

42.

Beware of the person of one book.

Aquinas, St. Thomas

43.

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

Carey, Joyce

44.

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

45.

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

Mcluhan, Marshall

46.

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

47.

If I have not read a book before, it is, for all intents and purposes, new to me whether it was printed yesterday or three hundred years ago.

Hazlitt, William

48.

I always like to look on the optimistic side of life, but I am realistic enough to know that life is a complex matter.