Motivational Quotes

Books - reading

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

- Mencken, H. L.

Best Quotes about Books - reading

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

Pound, Ezra

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

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

Wesley, John

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

The Bible remained for me a book of books, still divine -- but divine in the sense that all great books are divine which teach men how to live righteously.

Keith, Sir Arthur

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

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

Marcel, Anthony

Most books today seemed to have been written overnight from books read the day before.

Chamfort, Sebastien-Roch Nicolas De

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

Mccay, James T.

10.

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

Maugham, W. Somerset

11.

Books, books, books had found the secret of a garret-room piled high with cases in my father's name; Piled high, packed large, --where, creeping in and out among the giant fossils of my past, like some small nimble mouse between the ribs of a mastodon, I nibbled here and there at this or that box, pulling through the gap, in heats of terror, haste, victorious joy, the first book first. And how I felt it beat under my pillow, in the morning's dark. An hour before the sun would let me read! My books!

Browning, Elizabeth Barrett

12.

It does not follow because many books are written by persons born in America that there exists an American literature. Books which imitate or represent the thoughts and life of Europe do not constitute an American literature. Before such can exist, an original idea must animate this nation and fresh currents of life must call into life fresh thoughts along the shore.

Fuller, Margaret

13.

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

Belloc, Hilaire

14.

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

15.

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

16.

When we read a story, we inhabit it. The covers of the book are like a roof and four walls. What is to happen next will take place within the four walls of the story. And this is possible because the story's voice makes everything its own.

Berger, John

17.

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

Gibbon, Edward

18.

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

19.

Until it is kindled by a spirit as flamingly alive as the one which gave it birth a book is dead to us. Words divested of their magic are but dead hieroglyphs.

Miller, Henry

20.

The book to read is not the one which thinks for you, but the one which makes you think. No book in the world equals the Bible for that.

Mccosh

21.

Books and marriage go ill together.

Moliere

22.

Books are not men and yet they stay alive.

Benet, Stephen Vincent

23.

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

24.

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

Voltaire

25.

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

Critchfield, Jim

26.

One always tends to overpraise a long book, because one has got through it.

Forster, Edward M.

27.

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

28.

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

29.

A dose of poison can do its work but once. A bad book can go on poisoning minds for generations.

Murray, William

30.

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

31.

The age of the book is almost gone.

Steiner, George

32.

A successful book cannot afford to be more than ten percent new.

Mcluhan, Marshall

33.

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

Whitman, Walt

34.

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

Lytton, Lord Edward

35.

She could give herself up to the written word as naturally as a good dancer to music or a fine swimmer to water. The only difficulty was that after finishing the last sentence she was left with a feeling at once hollow and uncomfortably full. Exactly like indigestion.

Rhys, Jean

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.

Reading makes immigrants of us all. It takes us away from home, but more important, it finds homes for us everywhere.

Rochman, Hazel

38.

The power of a text is different when it is read from when it is copied out. Only the copied text thus commands the soul of him who is occupied with it, whereas the mere reader never discovers the new aspects of his inner self that are opened by the text, that road cut through the interior jungle forever closing behind it: because the reader follows the movement of his mind in the free flight of day-dreaming, whereas the copier submits it to command.

Benjamin, Walter

39.

I used to walk to school with my nose buried in a book.

Coolio

40.

I am not a speed reader. I am a speed understander.

Asimov, Isaac

41.

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

42.

There are books so alive that you're always afraid that while you weren't reading, the book has gone and changed, has shifted like a river; while you went on living, it went on living too, and like a river moved on and moved away. No one has stepped twice into the same river. But did anyone ever step twice into the same book?

Tsvetaeva, Marina

43.

All the best stories in the world are but one story in reality -- the story of escape. It is the only thing which interests us all and at all times, how to escape.

Benson, Arthur Christopher

44.

There is no robber worse than a bad book.

Proverb, Italian

45.

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

Faulkner, William

46.

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

47.

If a secret history of books could be written, and the author's private thoughts and meanings noted down alongside of his story, how many insipid volumes would become interesting, and dull tales excite the reader!

Thackeray, William M.

48.

A novel is a mirror carried along a main road.

Stendhal, Henri B.

49.

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

50.

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

Phillips, Wendell