Motivational Quotes

Books - reading

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

Best Quotes about Books - reading

When the book comes out it may hurt you -- but in order for me to do it, it had to hurt me first. I can only tell you about yourself as much as I can face about myself.

Baldwin, James

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

Jackson, Holbrook

The multitude of books is a great evil. There is no limit to this fever for writing.

Luther, Martin

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

Joubert, Joseph

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

Rohn, Jim

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

Coolio

Books and marriage go ill together.

Moliere

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

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

Rochman, Hazel

10.

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

11.

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

Faulkner, William

12.

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

13.

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

14.

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

Lee, Spike

15.

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

16.

I am a part of everything that I have read.

Kieran, John

17.

The successful Accelerated Reader is able to read larger than normal blocks or bites of the printed page with each eye stop. He has accepted, without reservation, the philosophy that the most important benefit of reading is the gaining of information, ideas, mental picture and entertainment-not the fretting over words. He has come to the realization that words in and of themselves are for the most part insignificant.

Cutler, Wade E.

18.

Without books the development of civilization would have been impossible. They are the engines of change, windows on the world, Lighthouses as the poet said erected in the sea of time. They are companions, teachers, magicians, bankers of the treasures of the mind, Books are humanity in print.

Schopenhauer, Arthur

19.

The age of the book is almost gone.

Steiner, George

20.

What is the most precious, the most exciting smell awaiting you in the house when you return to it after a dozen years or so? The smell of roses, you think? No, moldering books.

Sinyavsky, Andre

21.

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

Critchfield, Jim

22.

There are very many people who read simply to prevent themselves from thinking.

Lichtenberg, Georg C.

23.

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

24.

A good book is the very essence of a good man. His virtues survive in it, while the foibles and faults of his actual life are forgotten. All the goodly company of the excellent and great sit around my table, or look down on me from yonder shelves, waiting patiently to answer my questions and enrich me with their wisdom. A precious book is a foretaste of immortality.

Cuyler, Theodore L.

25.

Hypocrite reader -- my fellow -- my brother!

Baudelaire, Charles

26.

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

Maclennan, Hugh

27.

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

Descartes, Rene

28.

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

Pound, Ezra

29.

Read good, big important things.

Noonan, Peggy

30.

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

31.

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

32.

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

33.

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

Butler, Samuel

34.

Thank you for sending me a copy of your book -- I'll waste no time reading it.

Hadas, Moses

35.

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

Phelps, William Lyon

36.

The worst readers are those who behave like plundering troops: they take away a few things they can use, dirty and confound the remainder, and revile the whole.

Nietzsche, Friedrich

37.

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

38.

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

Temple, Sir William

39.

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

Disraeli, Benjamin

40.

Much reading is an oppression of the mind, and extinguishes the natural candle, which is the reason of so many senseless scholars in the world.

Penn, William

41.

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

42.

Prerequisite for rereadability in books: that they be forgettable.

Rostand, Jean

43.

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

Asimov, Isaac

44.

The newest books are those that never grow old.

Jackson, George Holbrook

45.

A person who publishes a book appears willfully in public with his pants down.