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

There is creative reading as well as creative writing.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

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

The tools I need for my work are paper, tobacco, food, and a little whiskey.

Faulkner, William

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

Locke, John

What is reading, but silent conversation.

Landor, Walter Savage

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

A good book, in the language of the book-sellers, is a salable one; in that of the curious, a scarce one; in that of men of sense, a useful and instructive one.

Chambers, Oswald

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

Mencken, H. L.

You've really got to start hitting the books because it's no joke out here.

Lee, Spike

10.

Books, like friends, should be few and well chosen. Like friends, too, we should return to them again and again for, like true friends, they will never fail us -- never cease to instruct -- never cloy.

Colton, Charles Caleb

11.

There is more treasure in books than in all the pirates loot on Treasure Island and best of all, you can enjoy these riches every day of your life.

Disney, Walt

12.

A real book is not one that we read, but one that reads us.

Auden, W. H.

13.

I can't bear art that you can walk round and admire. A book should be either a bandit or a rebel or a man in the crowd.

Lawrence, D. H.

14.

The Brahmins say that in their books there are many predictions of times in which it will rain. But press those books as strongly as you can, you can not get out of them a drop of water. So you can not get out of all the books that contain the best precepts the smallest good deed.

Tolstoy, Count Leo

15.

Fiction reveals truth that reality obscures.

West, Jessamyn

16.

All the known world, excepting only savage nations, is governed by books.

Voltaire

17.

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

Millay, Edna St. Vincent

18.

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

19.

We ought to reverence books; to look on them as useful and mighty things. If they are good and true, whether they are about religion, politics, farming, trade, law, or medicine, they are the message of Christ, the maker of all things -- the teacher of all truth.

Kingsley, Charles

20.

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

Forster, Edward M.

21.

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

22.

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

23.

The things I want to know are in books; my best friend is the man who'll get me a book I ain't read.

Lincoln, Abraham

24.

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

Wycherley, William

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.

Nine-tenths of the existing books are nonsense and the clever books are the refutation of that nonsense.

Disraeli, Benjamin

27.

You should read books like you take medicine, by advice, and not by advertisement.

Ruskin, John

28.

A book that is shut is but a block.

Fuller, Thomas

29.

Tradition is but a meteor, which, if it once falls, cannot be rekindled. Memory, once interrupted, is not to be recalled. But written learning is a fixed luminary, which, after the cloud that had hidden it has passed away, is again bright in its proper station. So books are faithful repositories, which may be awhile neglected or forgotten, but when opened again, will again impart instruction.

Johnson

30.

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

Frost, Robert

31.

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

Ruskin, John

32.

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

Phillips, Wendell

33.

Reading is a basic tool in the living of a good life.

Adler, Mortimer J.

34.

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

35.

'Tis the good reader that makes the good book; in every book he finds passages which seem to be confidences or sides hidden from all else and unmistakably meant for his ear; the profit of books is according to the sensibility of the reader; the profound thought or passion sleeps as in a mine, until it is discovered by an equal mind and heart.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

36.

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

37.

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

38.

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

39.

The last thing one discovers in composing a work is what to put first.

Pascal, Blaise

40.

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

41.

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

42.

A bad book is the worse that it cannot repent. It has not been the devil's policy to keep the masses of mankind in ignorance; but finding that they will read, he is doing all in his power to poison their books.

Kirk, E.N.

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.

Happy is he who has laid up in his youth, and held fast in all fortune, a genuine and passionate love for reading.

Choate, Rufus

45.

Everything in this book may be wrong. [The Savior's Manual]

Bach, Richard

46.

He that loves a book will never want a faithful friend, a wholesome counselor, a cheerful companion, an effectual comforter. By study, by reading, by thinking, one may innocently divert and pleasantly entertain himself, as in all weathers, as in all fortunes.

Barrow

47.

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

Secondat, Charles de

48.

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

49.

There is no robber worse than a bad book.

Proverb, Italian

50.

Until I feared I would lose it, I never loved to read. One does not love breathing.