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

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

Barrett, E.S.

Americans will listen, but they do not care to read. War and Peace must wait for the leisure of retirement, which never really comes: meanwhile it helps to furnish the living room. Blockbusting fiction is bought as furniture. Unread, it maintains its value. Read, it looks like money wasted. Cunningly, Americans know that books contain a person, and they want the person, not the book.

Burgess, Anthony

An empty book is like an infant's soul, in which anything may be written. It is capable of all things, but containeth nothing. I have a mind to fill this with profitable wonders.

Traherne, Thomas

The newest books are those that never grow old.

Jackson, George Holbrook

Hypocrite reader -- my fellow -- my brother!

Baudelaire, Charles

Nine-tenths of the existing books are nonsense and the clever books are the refutation of that nonsense.

Disraeli, Benjamin

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

Rohn, Jim

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 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.

10.

There is more treasure in books than in all the pirates loot on Treasure Island and best of all, you can enjoy these riches every day of your life.

Disney, Walt

11.

There is no such thing as a moral book or an immoral book. Books are well written or badly written. That is all.

Wilde, Oscar

12.

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

Channing, William Ellery

13.

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

14.

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

15.

Readers are less and less seen as mere non-writers, the subhuman other or flawed derivative of the author; the lack of a pen is no longer a shameful mark of secondary status but a positively enabling space, just as within every writer can be seen to lurk, as a repressed but contaminating antithesis, a reader.

Eagleton, Terry

16.

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

Coolio

17.

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.

18.

He that loves a book will never want a faithful friend, a wholesome counselor, a cheerful companion, an effectual comforter. By study, by reading, by thinking, one may innocently divert and pleasantly entertain himself, as in all weathers, as in all fortunes.

Barrow

19.

What is reading, but silent conversation.

Landor, Walter Savage

20.

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

Blackie, Professor

21.

When you reread a classic, you do not see more in the book than you did before; you see more in you than there was before.

Fadiman, Clifton

22.

I read the newspaper avidly. It is my one form of continuous fiction.

Bevan, Aneurin

23.

The pleasure of reading is doubled when one lives with another who shares the same books.

Mansfield, Katherine

24.

Reading is equivalent to thinking with someone else's head instead of with one's own.

Schopenhauer, Arthur

25.

My books kept me from the ring, the dog-pit, the tavern, and the saloon.

Hood, Thomas

26.

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

Rochman, Hazel

27.

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

Rohn, Jim

28.

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

29.

One half who graduate from college never read another book.

True, Herbert

30.

Somewhere, everywhere, now hidden, now apparent in what ever is written down, is the form of a human being. If we seek to know him, are we idly occupied?

Woolf, Virginia

31.

If a book comes from the heart it will contrive to reach other hearts. All art and author craft are of small account to that.

Carlyle, Thomas

32.

Old books, you know well, are books of the world's youth, and new books are the fruits of its age.

Holmes, Oliver Wendell

33.

Who ever converses among old books will be hard to please among the new.

Temple, Sir William

34.

Some of the most famous books are the least worth reading. Their fame was due to their having done something that needed to be doing in their day. The work is done and the virtue of the book has expired.

Morely, John

35.

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

Critchfield, Jim

36.

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

37.

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

38.

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

Lytton, Lord Edward

39.

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

Chamfort, Sebastien-Roch Nicolas De

40.

Five daily newspapers arrive in my California driveway. The New York times and the Wall Street Journal are supplemented by three local papers. As for magazines, I read, or at least skim, Business Week, Forbes, The Economist, INC; Industry Week, Fortune. Other subscriptions include Sales and Marketing Management, Modern Health Care, Progressive Grocer, High Tech Business, and Slaon Management Review from MIT. I religiously read Business Tokyo, Asia Week, and Far Eastern Economic Review. I glance at Newsweek and Time ... but I devour the New Republic, Policy Review, Foreign Affairs, The Washington Monthly, and Public Interest. How about books? A dozen or more each month.

Peters, Thomas J.

41.

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

Auden, W. H.

42.

Ideally a book would have no order to it, and the reader would have to discover his own.

Vaneigem, Raoul

43.

Thy books should, like thy friends, not many be, yet such wherein men may thy judgment see.

Wycherley, William

44.

Except a living man there is nothing more wonderful than a book! a message to us from the dead -- from human souls we never saw, who lived, perhaps, thousands of miles away. And yet these, in those little sheets of paper, speak to us, arouse us, terrify us, teach us, comfort us, open their hearts to us as brothers.

Kingsley, Charles

45.

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

Phelps, William Lyon

46.

Then I though of reading -- the nice and subtle happiness of reading ... this joy not dulled by age, this polite and unpunishable vice, this selfish, serene, lifelong intoxication.

Smith, Logan Pearsall

47.

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

48.

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

Bulwer-Lytton, Edward G.

49.

A novel is never anything, but a philosophy put into images.

Camus, Albert

50.

Book love... is your pass to the greatest, the purest, and the most perfect pleasure that God has prepared for His creatures.