Motivational Quotes

Books - reading

Books are not absolutely dead things, but do contain a certain potency of life in them, to be as active as the soul whose progeny they are; they preserve, as in a vial, the purest efficacy and extraction of the living intellect that bred them.

- Milton, John

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

He has only half learned the art of reading who has not added to it the more refined art of skipping and skimming.

Balfour, Arthur James

Books are masters who instruct us without rods or ferules, without words or anger, without bread or money. If you approach them, they are not asleep; if you seek them, they do not hide; if you blunder, they do not scold; if you are ignorant, they do not laugh at you.

Bury, Richard De

You can either read something many times in order to be assured that you got it all, or else you can define your purpose and use techniques which will assure that you have met it and gotten what you need.

Kump, Peter

Beware of the person of one book.

Aquinas, St. Thomas

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

Holmes, Oliver Wendell

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

Camus, Albert

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

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

10.

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

Murray, William

11.

The classics are only primitive literature. They belong to the same class as primitive machinery and primitive music and primitive medicine.

Leacock, Stephen B.

12.

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

Schopenhauer, Arthur

13.

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

Descartes, Rene

14.

To read too many books is harmful.

Zedong, Mao

15.

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

16.

There are people who read too much: bibliobibuli. I know some who are constantly drunk on books, as other men are drunk on whiskey or religion. They wander through this most diverting and stimulating of worlds in a haze, seeing nothing and hearing nothing.

Mencken, H. L.

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.

I love to lose myself in other men's minds. When I am not walking, I am reading. I cannot sit and think; books think for me.

Lamb, Charles

19.

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

Phelps, William Lyon

20.

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

21.

A book worth reading is worth buying.

Ruskin, John

22.

The things I want to know are in books; my best friend is the man who'll get me a book I ain't read.

Lincoln, Abraham

23.

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

24.

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

Belloc, Hilaire

25.

No furniture is so charming as books.

Smith, Sydney

26.

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

Twain, Mark

27.

A good title is the title of a successful book.

Chandler, Raymond

28.

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

Lichtenberg, Georg C.

29.

People are much more willing to lend you books than bookcases.

Twain, Mark

30.

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.

31.

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

Wycherley, William

32.

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

33.

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

34.

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

Harington, John

35.

What is a diary as a rule? A document useful to the person who keeps it. Dull to the contemporary who reads it and invaluable to the student, centuries afterwards, who treasures it.

Terry, Helen

36.

He had read much, if one considers his long life; but his contemplation was much more than his reading. He was wont to say that if he had read as much as other men he should have known no more than other men.

Aubrey, John

37.

Reading is a basic tool in the living of a good life.

Adler, Mortimer J.

38.

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.

39.

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

40.

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

Johnson, Samuel

41.

Very young children eat their books, literally devouring their contents. This is one reason for the scarcity of first editions of Alice in Wonderland and other favorites of the nursery.

Rosenbach, A. S. W.

42.

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

Phillips, Wendell

43.

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

44.

No entertainment is so cheap as reading, nor is any pleasure so lasting.

Montagu, Lady Mary Wortley

45.

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

46.

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.

47.

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

Bulwer-Lytton, Edward G.

48.

I can't bear art that you can walk round and admire. A book should be either a bandit or a rebel or a man in the crowd.

Lawrence, D. H.

49.

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

50.

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

Hood, Thomas