Motivational Quotes

Books - reading

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

Best Quotes about Books - reading

There is creative reading as well as creative writing.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

You can either read something many times in order to be assured that you got it all, or else you can define your purpose and use techniques which will assure that you have met it and gotten what you need.

Kump, Peter

The chief knowledge that a man gets from reading books is the knowledge that very few of them are worth reading.

Mencken, H. L.

I read the newspaper avidly. It is my one form of continuous fiction.

Bevan, Aneurin

No man understands a deep book until he has seen and lived at least part of its contents.

Pound, Ezra

Everything you need for better future and success has already been written. And guess what? All you have to do is go to the library.

Rohn, Jim

The novel can't compete with cars, the movies, television, and liquor. A guy who's had a good feed and tanked up on good wine gives his old lady a kiss after supper and his day is over. Finished.

Celine, Louis-Ferdinand

Books are the best of things if well used; if abused, among the worst. They are good for nothing but to inspire. I had better never see a book than be warped by its attraction clean out of my own orbit, and made a satellite instead of a system.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

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

10.

Books are the blessed chloroform of the mind.

Chambers, Robert

11.

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.

12.

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

13.

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

14.

Readers are less and less seen as mere non-writers, the subhuman other or flawed derivative of the author; the lack of a pen is no longer a shameful mark of secondary status but a positively enabling space, just as within every writer can be seen to lurk, as a repressed but contaminating antithesis, a reader.

Eagleton, Terry

15.

In the dark colony of night, when I consider man's magnificent capacity for malice, madness, folly, envy, rage, and destructiveness, and I wonder whether we shall not end up as breakfast for newts and polyps, I seem to hear the muffled cries of all the words in all the books with covers closed.

Rosten, Leo

16.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

17.

Books succeed, and lives fail.

Browning, Elizabeth Barrett

18.

The books that everybody admires are those that nobody reads.

France, Anatole

19.

The successful Accelerated Reader is able to read larger than normal blocks or bites of the printed page with each eye stop. He has accepted, without reservation, the philosophy that the most important benefit of reading is the gaining of information, ideas, mental picture and entertainment-not the fretting over words. He has come to the realization that words in and of themselves are for the most part insignificant.

Cutler, Wade E.

20.

A book worth reading is worth buying.

Ruskin, John

21.

There are people who read too much: bibliobibuli. I know some who are constantly drunk on books, as other men are drunk on whiskey or religion. They wander through this most diverting and stimulating of worlds in a haze, seeing nothing and hearing nothing.

Mencken, H. L.

22.

This will never be a civilized country until we expend more money for books than we do for chewing gum.

Hubbard, Elbert

23.

To read too many books is harmful.

Zedong, Mao

24.

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

Parker, Dorothy

25.

Read nothing that you do not care to remember, and remember nothing you do not mean to use.

Blackie, Professor

26.

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

27.

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

Coolio

28.

Except a living man there is nothing more wonderful than a book! a message to us from the dead -- from human souls we never saw, who lived, perhaps, thousands of miles away. And yet these, in those little sheets of paper, speak to us, arouse us, terrify us, teach us, comfort us, open their hearts to us as brothers.

Kingsley, Charles

29.

Readers are plentiful: thinkers are rare.

Martineau, Harriet

30.

There is no such thing as a moral book or an immoral book. Books are well written or badly written. That is all.

Wilde, Oscar

31.

Early in the morning, at break of day, in all the freshness and dawn of one's strength, to read a book --I call that vicious!

Nietzsche, Friedrich

32.

A book that is shut is but a block.

Fuller, Thomas

33.

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

34.

Books are not men and yet they stay alive.

Benet, Stephen Vincent

35.

The world of books is the most remarkable creation of man nothing else that he builds ever lasts monuments fall; nations perish; civilization grow old and die out; new races build others. But in the world of books are volumes that have seen this happen again and again and yet live on. Still young, still as fresh as the day they were written, still telling men's hearts, of the hearts of men centuries dead.

Day, Clarence

36.

With one day's reading a man may have the key in his hands.

Pound, Ezra

37.

When I am dead, I hope it may be said: His sins were scarlet, but his books were read.

Belloc, Hilaire

38.

The multitude of books is a great evil. There is no limit to this fever for writing.

Luther, Martin

39.

A book is like a man -- clever and dull, brave and cowardly, beautiful and ugly. For every flowering thought there will be a page like a wet and mangy mongrel, and for every looping flight a tap on the wing and a reminder that wax cannot hold the feathers firm too near the sun.

Steinbeck, John

40.

Beware of the person of one book.

Aquinas, St. Thomas

41.

This is not a book. This is libel, slander, defamation of character. This is not a book, in the ordinary sense of the word. No, this is a prolonged insult, a gob of spit in the face of Art, a kick in the pants to God, Man, Destiny, Time, Love, Beauty... what you will. I am going to sing for you, a little off key perhaps, but I will sing.

Miller, Henry

42.

No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader.

Frost, Robert

43.

A library is thought in cold storage.

Samuel, Herbert

44.

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

45.

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

46.

Reading is equivalent to thinking with someone else's head instead of with one's own.

Schopenhauer, Arthur

47.

Books are the bees which carry the quickening pollen from one to another mind.

Lowell, James Russell

48.

The classics are only primitive literature. They belong to the same class as primitive machinery and primitive music and primitive medicine.

Leacock, Stephen B.

49.

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