Motivational Quotes

Books - reading

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

- Luther, Martin

Best Quotes about Books - reading

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

To feel most beautifully alive means to be reading something beautiful, ready always to apprehend in the flow of language the sudden flash of poetry.

Bachelard, Gaston

My books are water; those of the great geniuses are wine -- everybody drinks water.

Twain, Mark

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

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

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

Murray, William

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

Rohn, Jim

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

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

Blackie, Professor

10.

What is reading, but silent conversation.

Landor, Walter Savage

11.

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.

12.

A man ought to read just as his inclination leads him; for what he reads as a task will do him little good.

Johnson, Samuel

13.

A house is not a home unless it contains food and fire for the mind as well as the body.

Fuller, Margaret

14.

The reading of all good books is like a conversation with all the finest men of past centuries.

Descartes, Rene

15.

Prerequisite for rereadability in books: that they be forgettable.

Rostand, Jean

16.

Thy books should, like thy friends, not many be, yet such wherein men may thy judgment see.

Wycherley, William

17.

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

Pound, Ezra

18.

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

19.

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

20.

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

21.

Today a reader, tomorrow a leader.

Fusselman, W.

22.

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

23.

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

Mencken, H. L.

24.

Ideally a book would have no order to it, and the reader would have to discover his own.

Vaneigem, Raoul

25.

Reading is to the mind what exercise is to the body. It is wholesome and bracing for the mind to have its faculties kept on the stretch.

Steele, Sir Richard

26.

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

27.

A novel is a mirror carried along a main road.

Stendhal, Henri B.

28.

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

Asimov, Isaac

29.

One half who graduate from college never read another book.

True, Herbert

30.

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

Maclennan, Hugh

31.

I am a part of everything that I have read.

Kieran, John

32.

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

Tupper, Martin

33.

No one can read with profit that which he cannot learn to read with pleasure.

Porter, Noah

34.

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

35.

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

Leacock, Stephen B.

36.

Books are divided into two classes, the books of the hour and the books of all time.

Ruskin, John

37.

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

38.

A bibliophile of little means is likely to suffer often. Books don't slip from his hands but fly past him through the air, high as birds, high as prices.

Neruda, Pablo

39.

I know every book of mine by its smell, and I have but to put my nose between the pages to be reminded of all sorts of things.

Gissing, George Robert

40.

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

Lichtenberg, Georg C.

41.

Books are not absolutely dead things, but do contain a certain potency of life in them, to be as active as the soul whose progeny they are; they preserve, as in a vial, the purest efficacy and extraction of the living intellect that bred them.

Milton, John

42.

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

43.

What is the most precious, the most exciting smell awaiting you in the house when you return to it after a dozen years or so? The smell of roses, you think? No, moldering books.

Sinyavsky, Andre

44.

The reading or non-reading a book will never keep down a single petticoat.

Byron, Lord

45.

A good title is the title of a successful book.

Chandler, Raymond

46.

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

47.

When a book raises your spirit, and inspires you with noble and manly thoughts, seek for no other test of its excellence. It is good, and made by a good workman.

Bruyere, Jean De La

48.

From the moment I picked your book up until I laid it down I was convulsed with laughter. Some day I intend reading it.

Marx, Groucho

49.

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

50.

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