Motivational Quotes

Books - reading

Once we have learned to read, meaning of words can somehow register without consciousness.

- Marcel, Anthony

Best Quotes about Books - reading

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.

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

Belloc, Hilaire

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.

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

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

Pound, Ezra

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

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

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

Fuller, Margaret

No entertainment is so cheap as reading, nor is any pleasure so lasting.

Montagu, Lady Mary Wortley

10.

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

11.

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.

12.

Books are lighthouses erected in the great sea of time.

Whipple, Edwin P.

13.

Read as you taste fruit or savor wine, or enjoy friendship, love or life.

Jackson, Holbrook

14.

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

15.

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

Barrett, E.S.

16.

Books are the blessed chloroform of the mind.

Chambers, Robert

17.

Books had instant replay long before televised sports.

Williams, Bert

18.

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

Byron, Lord

19.

How can you dare teach a man to read until you've taught him everything else first?

Shaw, George Bernard

20.

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

21.

After all, the world is not a stage -- not to me: nor a theatre: nor a show-house of any sort. And art, especially novels, are not little theatres where the reader sits aloft and watches... and sighs, commiserates, condones and smiles. That's what you want a book to be: because it leaves you so safe and superior, with your two-dollar ticket to the show. And that's what my books are not and never will be. Whoever reads me will be in the thick of the scrimmage, and if he doesn't like it -- if he wants a safe seat in the audience -- let him read someone else.

Lawrence, D. H.

22.

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

23.

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

Luther, Martin

24.

Read good, big important things.

Noonan, Peggy

25.

After all manner of professors have done their best for us, the place we are to get knowledge is in books. The true university of these days is a collection of books.

Carlyle, Thomas

26.

Today a reader, tomorrow a leader.

Fusselman, W.

27.

You are wise, witty and wonderful, but you spend too much time reading this sort of stuff.

Critchfield, Jim

28.

The oldest books are still only just out to those who have not read them.

Butler, Samuel

29.

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

Brodsky, Joseph

30.

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

Harington, John

31.

Prerequisite for rereadability in books: that they be forgettable.

Rostand, Jean

32.

The constant habit of perusing devout books is so indispensable, that it has been termed the oil of the lamp of prayer. Too much reading, however, and too little meditation, may produce the effect of a lamp inverted; which is extinguished by the very excess of that ailment, whose property is to feed it.

More, Hannah

33.

When the book comes out it may hurt you -- but in order for me to do it, it had to hurt me first. I can only tell you about yourself as much as I can face about myself.

Baldwin, James

34.

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

Lytton, Lord Edward

35.

For a good book has this quality, that it is not merely a petrifaction of its author, but that once it has been tossed behind, like Deucalion's little stone, it acquires a separate and vivid life of its own.

Lejeune, Caroline

36.

When I get a little money, I buy books; and if any is left I buy food and clothes.

Erasmus, Desiderius

37.

The books one has written in the past have two surprises in store: one couldn't write them again, and wouldn't want to.

Rostand, Jean

38.

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

39.

The great American novel has not only already been written, it has already been rejected.

Dane, Frank

40.

Digressions, incontestably, are the sunshine; they are the life, the soul of reading! Take them out of this book, for instance, --you might as well take the book along with them; --one cold external winter would reign in every page of it; restore them to the writer; --he steps forth like a bridegroom, --bids All-hail; brings in variety, and forbids the appetite to fail.

Sterne, Laurence

41.

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

42.

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

43.

Readers are plentiful: thinkers are rare.

Martineau, Harriet

44.

Very young children eat their books, literally devouring their contents. This is one reason for the scarcity of first editions of Alice in Wonderland and other favorites of the nursery.

Rosenbach, A. S. W.

45.

Learning to read has been reduced to a process of mastering a series of narrow, specific, hierarchical skills. Where armed-forces recruits learn the components of a rifle or the intricacies of close order drill by the numbers, recruits to reading learn its mechanics sound by sound and word by word.

Gross, Jacquelyn

46.

Read Homer once, and you can read no more. For all books else appear so mean, and so poor. Verse will seem prose; but still persist to read, and Homer will be all the books you need.

Buckingham, Duke of

47.

The reason a writer writes a book is to forget a book and the reason a reader reads one is to remember it.

Wolfe, Thomas

48.

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

Lee, Harper

49.

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

50.

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