Motivational Quotes

Books - reading

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

Best Quotes about Books - reading

How many a man has dated a new era in his life from the reading of a book! The book exists for us, perchance, that will explain our miracles and reveal new ones. The at present unutterable things we may find somewhere uttered.

Thoreau, Henry David

The books that everybody admires are those that nobody reads.

France, Anatole

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

Porter, Noah

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

Butler, Samuel

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

Johnson, Samuel

The flood of print has turned reading into a process of gulping rather than savoring

Chappell, Warren

In the case of good books, the point is not how many of them you can get through, but rather how many can get through to you.

Adler, Mortimer J.

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

Descartes, Rene

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

10.

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

11.

A library is thought in cold storage.

Samuel, Herbert

12.

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

Frost, Robert

13.

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

14.

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

Phillips, Wendell

15.

It is from books that wise people derive consolation in the troubles of life.

Hugo, Victor

16.

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

Secondat, Charles de

17.

No furniture is so charming as books.

Smith, Sydney

18.

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

Belloc, Hilaire

19.

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

Lee, Spike

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.

Does there, I wonder, exist a being who has read all, or approximately all, that the person of average culture is supposed to have read, and that not to have read is a social sin? If such a being does exist, surely he is an old, a very old man.

Bennett, Arnold

22.

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

Lee, Harper

23.

A book is a part of life, a manifestation of life, just as much as a tree or a horse or a star. It obeys its own rhythms, its own laws, whether it be a novel, a play, or a diary. The deep, hidden rhythm of life is always there -- that of the pulse, the heart beat.

Miller, Henry

24.

A novel points out that the world consists entirely of exceptions.

Carey, Joyce

25.

The words of my book nothing, the drift of it everything.

Whitman, Walt

26.

The world may be full of fourth-rate writers but it's also full of fourth-rate readers.

Barstow, Stan

27.

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

28.

Books are but waste paper unless we spend in action the wisdom we get from thought -- asleep. When we are weary of the living, we may repair to the dead, who have nothing of peevishness, pride, or design in their conversation.

Collier, Jeremy

29.

Early in the morning, at break of day, in all the freshness and dawn of one's strength, to read a book --I call that vicious!

Nietzsche, Friedrich

30.

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

31.

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

32.

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

33.

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

Barrett, E.S.

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.

The mortality of all inanimate things is terrible to me, but that of books most of all.

Howells, William Dean

36.

There is a set of religious, or rather moral, writings which teach that virtue is the certain road to happiness, and vice to misery in this world. A very wholesome and comfortable doctrine, and to which we have but one objection, namely, that it is not true.

Fielding, Henry

37.

I don't think any good book is based on factual experience. Bad books are about things the writer already knew before he wrote them.

Fuentes, Carlos

38.

God be thanked for books; they are the voices of the distant and the dead, and make us heirs of the spiritual life of past ages.

Channing, William Ellery

39.

Books are the bees which carry the quickening pollen from one to another mind.

Lowell, James Russell

40.

I am a part of everything that I have read.

Kieran, John

41.

Books are standing counselors and preachers, always at hand, and always disinterested; having this advantage over oral instructors, that they are ready to repeat their lesson as often as we please.

Chambers, Oswald

42.

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

43.

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

44.

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

Twain, Mark

45.

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

Carlyle, Thomas

46.

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

Erasmus, Desiderius

47.

The newest books are those that never grow old.