Motivational Quotes

Books - reading

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

- Montagu, Lady Mary Wortley

Best Quotes about Books - reading

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

Belloc, Hilaire

The book salesman should be honored because he brings to our attention, as a rule, the very books we need most and neglect most.

Crane, Frank

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

Descartes, Rene

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

Books are the blessed chloroform of the mind.

Chambers, Robert

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

Asimov, Isaac

We are too civil to books. For a few golden sentences we will turn over and actually read a volume of four or five hundred pages.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

The books we read should be chosen with great care, that they may be, as an Egyptian king wrote over his library, The medicines of the soul.

Hood, Paxton

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.

To read too many books is harmful.

Zedong, Mao

11.

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

12.

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

Lowell, James Russell

13.

This is not a book. This is libel, slander, defamation of character. This is not a book, in the ordinary sense of the word. No, this is a prolonged insult, a gob of spit in the face of Art, a kick in the pants to God, Man, Destiny, Time, Love, Beauty... what you will. I am going to sing for you, a little off key perhaps, but I will sing.

Miller, Henry

14.

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

15.

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

16.

You will find most books worth reading are worth reading twice.

Morely, John

17.

A book is a part of life, a manifestation of life, just as much as a tree or a horse or a star. It obeys its own rhythms, its own laws, whether it be a novel, a play, or a diary. The deep, hidden rhythm of life is always there -- that of the pulse, the heart beat.

Miller, Henry

18.

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.

19.

No man understands a deep book until he has seen and lived at least part of its contents.

Pound, Ezra

20.

In the case of good books, the point is not how many of them you can get through, but rather how many can get through to you.

Adler, Mortimer J.

21.

After all manner of professors have done their best for us, the place we are to get knowledge is in books. The true university of these days is a collection of books.

Carlyle, Thomas

22.

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

23.

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

Twain, Mark

24.

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

Harington, John

25.

A good title is the title of a successful book.

Chandler, Raymond

26.

No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader.

Frost, Robert

27.

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

28.

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

Coolio

29.

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

30.

Next to acquiring good friends, the best acquisition is that of good books.

Colton, Charles Caleb

31.

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

32.

A great book should leave you with many experiences and slightly exhausted at the end. You should live several lives while reading it.

Styron, William

33.

Here, my dear Lucy, hide these books. Quick, quick! Fling Peregrine Pickle under the toilette --throw Roderick Random into the closet --put The Innocent Adultery into The Whole Duty of Man; thrust Lord Aimworth under the sofa! cram Ovid behind the bolster; there --put The Man of Feeling into your pocket. Now for them.

Sheridan, Richard Brinsley

34.

The books that the world calls immoral are the books that show the world its own shame.

Wilde, Oscar

35.

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

36.

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.

37.

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

38.

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

39.

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

Whitman, Walt

40.

A big leather-bound volume makes an ideal razor strap. A thin book is useful to stick under a table with a broken caster to steady it. A large, flat atlas can be used to cover a window with a broken pane. And a thick, old-fashioned heavy book with a clasp is the finest thing in the world to throw at a noisy cat.

Twain, Mark

41.

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

Joubert, Joseph

42.

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

43.

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

Voltaire

44.

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

Butler, Samuel

45.

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

Forster, Edward M.

46.

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

Camus, Albert

47.

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

48.

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

49.

The world of books is the most remarkable creation of man nothing else that he builds ever lasts monuments fall; nations perish; civilization grow old and die out; new races build others. But in the world of books are volumes that have seen this happen again and again and yet live on. Still young, still as fresh as the day they were written, still telling men's hearts, of the hearts of men centuries dead.

Day, Clarence

50.

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