Motivational Quotes

Books - reading

In science, read by preference the newest works. In literature, read the oldest. The classics are always modern.

- Lytton, Lord Edward

Best Quotes about Books - reading

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

Prerequisite for rereadability in books: that they be forgettable.

Rostand, Jean

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

Books give not wisdom where none was before. But where some is, there reading makes it more.

Harington, John

The books that everybody admires are those that nobody reads.

France, Anatole

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

To sit alone in the lamplight with a book spread out before you hold intimate converse with men of unseen generations -- such is pleasure beyond compare.

Kenko, Yoshida

The mere brute pleasure of reading --the sort of pleasure a cow must have in grazing.

Chesterton, Gilbert K.

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

10.

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

11.

Books are the blessed chloroform of the mind.

Chambers, Robert

12.

Books to judicious compilers, are useful; to particular arts and professions, they are absolutely necessary; to men of real science, they are tools: but more are tools to them.

Johnson

13.

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

Gibbon, Edward

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.

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

Gibbon, Edward

16.

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

17.

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

18.

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.

19.

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

Coolio

20.

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

Rochman, Hazel

21.

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

22.

What gunpowder did for war the printing press has done for the mind.

Phillips, Wendell

23.

A book might be written on the injustice of the just.

Hope, Anthony

24.

Old books that have ceased to be of service should no more be abandoned than should old friends who have ceased to give pleasure.

Worsthorne, Sir Peregrine

25.

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

26.

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

27.

The Bible remained for me a book of books, still divine -- but divine in the sense that all great books are divine which teach men how to live righteously.

Keith, Sir Arthur

28.

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

Hugo, Victor

29.

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

30.

Beware you be not swallowed up in books! An ounce of love is worth a pound of knowledge.

Wesley, John

31.

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

Colton, Charles Caleb

32.

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

33.

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

34.

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

Hubbard, Elbert

35.

All my good reading, you might say, was done in the toilet. There are passages in Ulysses which can be read only in the toilet -- if one wants to extract the full flavor of their content.

Miller, Henry

36.

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

37.

The only books that influence us are those for which we are ready, and which have gone a little farther down our particular path than we have yet got ourselves.

Forster, Edward M.

38.

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

Johnson, Samuel

39.

I love to lose myself in other men's minds. When I am not walking, I am reading. I cannot sit and think; books think for me.

Lamb, Charles

40.

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

Temple, Sir William

41.

Books are men of higher stature; the only men that speak aloud for future times to hear.

Barrett, E.S.

42.

A great book should leave you with many experiences and slightly exhausted at the end. You should live several lives while reading it.

Styron, William

43.

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

Locke, John

44.

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

Wilde, Oscar

45.

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

Maclennan, Hugh

46.

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

47.

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

48.

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

Porter, Noah

49.

Books succeed, and lives fail.

Browning, Elizabeth Barrett

50.

Some books leave us free and some books make us free.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo