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

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

Disney, Walt

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

Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth

There are two kinds of books. Those that no one reads and those that no one ought to read.

Mencken, H. L.

A wicked book cannot repent.

Proverb

The book salesman should be honored because he brings to our attention, as a rule, the very books we need most and neglect most.

Crane, Frank

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.

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

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

Gibbon, Edward

10.

Books that you carry to the fire, and hold readily in your hand, are most useful after all.

Johnson, Samuel

11.

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

12.

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

Secondat, Charles de

13.

Here, my dear Lucy, hide these books. Quick, quick! Fling Peregrine Pickle under the toilette --throw Roderick Random into the closet --put The Innocent Adultery into The Whole Duty of Man; thrust Lord Aimworth under the sofa! cram Ovid behind the bolster; there --put The Man of Feeling into your pocket. Now for them.

Sheridan, Richard Brinsley

14.

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

Mencken, H. L.

15.

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

16.

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

Hubbard, Elbert

17.

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

18.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

19.

The books one reads in childhood, and perhaps most of all the bad and good bad books, create in one's mind a sort of false map of the world, a series of fabulous countries into which one can retreat at odd moments throughout the rest of life, and which in some cases can survive a visit to the real countries which they are supposed to represent.

Orwell, George

20.

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

Brodsky, Joseph

21.

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

Whitman, Walt

22.

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

Baker, Nicholson

23.

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

Hunt, Leigh

24.

Then I though of reading -- the nice and subtle happiness of reading ... this joy not dulled by age, this polite and unpunishable vice, this selfish, serene, lifelong intoxication.

Smith, Logan Pearsall

25.

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

26.

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

27.

Today a reader, tomorrow a leader.

Fusselman, W.

28.

Old books, you know well, are books of the world's youth, and new books are the fruits of its age.

Holmes, Oliver Wendell

29.

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

Morely, John

30.

Books constitute capital. A library book lasts as long as a house, for hundreds of years. It is not, then, an article of mere consumption but fairly of capital, and often in the case of professional men, setting out in life, it is their only capital.

Jefferson, Thomas

31.

There are books so alive that you're always afraid that while you weren't reading, the book has gone and changed, has shifted like a river; while you went on living, it went on living too, and like a river moved on and moved away. No one has stepped twice into the same river. But did anyone ever step twice into the same book?

Tsvetaeva, Marina

32.

In science read the newest works, in literature read the oldest.

Bulwer-Lytton, Edward G.

33.

Books succeed, and lives fail.

Browning, Elizabeth Barrett

34.

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

35.

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

Milton, John

36.

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

Lichtenberg, Georg C.

37.

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

Locke, John

38.

The good of a book lies in its being read. A book is made up of signs that speak of other signs, which in their turn speak of things. Without an eye to read them, a book contains signs that produce no concepts; therefore it is dumb.

Eco, Umberto

39.

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

40.

To learn to read is to light a fire; every syllable that is spelled out is a spark.

Hugo, Victor

41.

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

Schopenhauer, Arthur

42.

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

Bevan, Aneurin

43.

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