Motivational Quotes

Books - reading

What is important is not to be able to read rapidly, but to be able to decide what not to read.

- Mccay, James T.

Best Quotes about Books - reading

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

There are two kinds of books. Those that no one reads and those that no one ought to read.

Mencken, H. L.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

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

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

You will, I am sure, agree with me that... if page 534 only finds us in the second chapter, the length of the first one must have been really intolerable.

Doyle, Sir Arthur Conan

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

Belloc, Hilaire

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

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

Barrett, E.S.

10.

Only a generation of readers will span a generation of writers.

Spielberg, Steven

11.

Books constitute capital. A library book lasts as long as a house, for hundreds of years. It is not, then, an article of mere consumption but fairly of capital, and often in the case of professional men, setting out in life, it is their only capital.

Jefferson, Thomas

12.

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

13.

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

Rohn, Jim

14.

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

15.

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

16.

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

Byron, Lord

17.

Do we write books so that they shall merely be read? Don't we also write them for employment in the household? For one that is read from start to finish, thousands are leafed through, other thousands lie motionless, others are jammed against mouseholes, thrown at rats, others are stood on, sat on, drummed on, have gingerbread baked on them or are used to light pipes.

Lichtenberg, Georg C.

18.

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

Butler, Samuel

19.

The novel can't compete with cars, the movies, television, and liquor. A guy who's had a good feed and tanked up on good wine gives his old lady a kiss after supper and his day is over. Finished.

Celine, Louis-Ferdinand

20.

The book you don't read won't help.

Rohn, Jim

21.

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

Marcel, Anthony

22.

Today a reader, tomorrow a leader.

Fusselman, W.

23.

There was a time when the world acted on books; now books act on the world.

Joubert, Joseph

24.

Many books require no thought from those who read them, and for a very simple reason: they made no such demand upon those who wrote them. Those works, therefore, are the most valuable, that set our thinking faculties in the fullest operation. understand them.

Clarendon

25.

As writers become more numerous, it is natural for readers to become more indolent; whence must necessarily arise a desire of attaining knowledge with the greatest possible ease.

Goldsmith, Oliver

26.

No furniture is so charming as books.

Smith, Sydney

27.

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

Lowell, James Russell

28.

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

29.

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

30.

To buy books would be a good thing if we also could buy the time to read them.

Schopenhauer, Arthur

31.

The greatest gift is the passion for reading. It is cheap, it consoles, it distracts, it excites, it gives you knowledge of the world and experience of a wide kind. It is a moral illumination.

Hardwick, Elizabeth

32.

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

Gibbon, Edward

33.

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

34.

With one day's reading a man may have the key in his hands.

Pound, Ezra

35.

Every man is a volume if you know how to read him.

Channing, William Ellery

36.

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

Locke, John

37.

Read good, big important things.

Noonan, Peggy

38.

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

Bach, Richard

39.

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

40.

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

Brodsky, Joseph

41.

Read nothing that you do not care to remember, and remember nothing you do not mean to use.

Blackie, Professor

42.

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

Phillips, Wendell

43.

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

Harington, John

44.

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

Jackson, Holbrook

45.

The books we think we ought to read are poky, dull, and dry; The books that we would like to read we are ashamed to buy; The books that people talk about we never can recall; And the books that people give us, oh, they're the worst of all.

Wells, Carolyn

46.

Reading the Scriptures is an uplifting experience.

47.

The man who does not read books has no advantage over the man that can not read them.

Twain, Mark

48.

I wish I could write a beautiful book to break those hearts that are soon to cease to exist: a book of faith and small neat worlds and of people who live by the philosophies of popular songs.

49.

In science read the newest works, in literature read the oldest.

Bulwer-Lytton, Edward G.

50.

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