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

Hypocrite reader -- my fellow -- my brother!

Baudelaire, Charles

A library is thought in cold storage.

Samuel, Herbert

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

Dane, Frank

Books are not men and yet they stay alive.

Benet, Stephen Vincent

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

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

Shaw, George Bernard

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

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

Everything you need for better future and success has already been written. And guess what? All you have to do is go to the library.

Rohn, Jim

10.

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

11.

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

Descartes, Rene

12.

Everywhere I have sought rest and not found it, except sitting in a corner by myself with a little book.

Kempis, Thomas

13.

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

14.

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

Johnson, Samuel

15.

The best effect of any book, is that it excites the reader to self-activity.

Carlyle, Thomas

16.

This book is not to be tossed lightly aside, but to be hurled with great force.

Parker, Dorothy

17.

To read too many books is harmful.

Zedong, Mao

18.

Next, in importance to books are their titles.

Davies, Paul

19.

Readers are plentiful: thinkers are rare.

Martineau, Harriet

20.

There are people who read too much: bibliobibuli. I know some who are constantly drunk on books, as other men are drunk on whiskey or religion. They wander through this most diverting and stimulating of worlds in a haze, seeing nothing and hearing nothing.

Mencken, H. L.

21.

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

22.

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

23.

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

Maclennan, Hugh

24.

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

25.

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

Auden, W. H.

26.

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

Byron, Lord

27.

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

Wesley, John

28.

If I have not read a book before, it is, for all intents and purposes, new to me whether it was printed yesterday or three hundred years ago.

Hazlitt, William

29.

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

Pascal, Blaise

30.

You can either read something many times in order to be assured that you got it all, or else you can define your purpose and use techniques which will assure that you have met it and gotten what you need.

Kump, Peter

31.

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

Jackson, Holbrook

32.

The most foolish kind of a book is a kind of leaky boat on the sea of wisdom; some of the wisdom will get in anyhow.

Holmes, Oliver Wendell

33.

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.

34.

I would sooner read a timetable or a catalog than nothing at all.

Maugham, W. Somerset

35.

Most books, like their authors, are born to die; of only a few books can it be said that death has no dominion over them; they live, and their influence lives forever.

Swartz, J.

36.

You will be the same person in five as you are today except for the people you meet and the books you read.

Jones, Charles ''Tremendous''

37.

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

38.

Miss a meal if you have to, but don't miss a book.

Rohn, Jim

39.

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

40.

Every abridgement of a good book is a fool abridged.

Montaigne, Michel Eyquem De

41.

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

Milton, John

42.

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

43.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

44.

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

45.

If I had my way books would not be written in English, but in an exceedingly difficult secret language that only skilled professional readers and story-tellers could interpret. Then people like you would have to go to public halls and pay good prices to hear the professionals decode and read the books aloud for you. This plan would have the advantage of scaring off all amateur authors, retired politicians, country doctors and I-Married-a-Midget writers who would not have the patience to learn the secret language.

Davies, Robertson

46.

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

47.

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

48.

Read good, big important things.

Noonan, Peggy

49.

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

50.

I divide all readers into two classes: those who read to remember and those who read to forget.

Phelps, William Lyon