Motivational Quotes

Books - reading

Every abridgement of a good book is a fool abridged.

- Montaigne, Michel Eyquem De

Best Quotes about Books - reading

A person of mature years and ripe development, who is expecting nothing from literature but the corroboration and renewal of past ideas, may find satisfaction in a lucidity so complete as to occasion no imaginative excitement, but young and ambitious students are not content with it. They seek the excitement because they are capable of the growth that it accompanies.

Cooley, Charles Horton

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

Twain, Mark

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

Voltaire

There is no robber worse than a bad book.

Proverb, Italian

To sit alone in the lamplight with a book spread out before you hold intimate converse with men of unseen generations -- such is pleasure beyond compare.

Kenko, Yoshida

The printing press is either the greatest blessing or the greatest curse of modern times, sometimes one forgets which it is.

Barrie, Sir James M.

The newest books are those that never grow old.

Jackson, George Holbrook

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

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

Asimov, Isaac

10.

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

11.

Books constitute capital. A library book lasts as long as a house, for hundreds of years. It is not, then, an article of mere consumption but fairly of capital, and often in the case of professional men, setting out in life, it is their only capital.

Jefferson, Thomas

12.

Everything in this book may be wrong. [The Savior's Manual]

Bach, Richard

13.

A house is not a home unless it contains food and fire for the mind as well as the body.

Fuller, Margaret

14.

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

Trollope, Anthony

15.

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

Joubert, Joseph

16.

No matter how busy you may think you are, you must find time for reading, or surrender yourself to self-chosen ignorance.

Townsend, Atwood H.

17.

What is reading, but silent conversation.

Landor, Walter Savage

18.

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

19.

You should read books like you take medicine, by advice, and not by advertisement.

Ruskin, John

20.

Books are divided into two classes, the books of the hour and the books of all time.

Ruskin, John

21.

Everywhere I have sought rest and not found it, except sitting in a corner by myself with a little book.

Kempis, Thomas

22.

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

Twain, Mark

23.

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

24.

This book is not to be tossed lightly aside, but to be hurled with great force.

Parker, Dorothy

25.

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

Lichtenberg, Georg C.

26.

Books succeed, and lives fail.

Browning, Elizabeth Barrett

27.

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

Rochman, Hazel

28.

Books are but waste paper unless we spend in action the wisdom we get from thought -- asleep. When we are weary of the living, we may repair to the dead, who have nothing of peevishness, pride, or design in their conversation.

Collier, Jeremy

29.

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

Johnson, Samuel

30.

One half who graduate from college never read another book.

True, Herbert

31.

Read good, big important things.

Noonan, Peggy

32.

To buy books would be a good thing if we also could buy the time to read them.

Schopenhauer, Arthur

33.

Digressions, incontestably, are the sunshine; they are the life, the soul of reading! Take them out of this book, for instance, --you might as well take the book along with them; --one cold external winter would reign in every page of it; restore them to the writer; --he steps forth like a bridegroom, --bids All-hail; brings in variety, and forbids the appetite to fail.

Sterne, Laurence

34.

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

Colton, Charles Caleb

35.

Books are not men and yet they stay alive.

Benet, Stephen Vincent

36.

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

37.

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

38.

A conventional good read is usually a bad read, a relaxing bath in what we know already. A true good read is surely an act of innovative creation in which we, the readers, become conspirators.

Bradbury, Malcolm

39.

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

Forster, Edward M.

40.

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

41.

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

42.

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

43.

Read Homer once, and you can read no more. For all books else appear so mean, and so poor. Verse will seem prose; but still persist to read, and Homer will be all the books you need.

Buckingham, Duke of

44.

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

Gibbon, Edward

45.

I don't think any good book is based on factual experience. Bad books are about things the writer already knew before he wrote them.

Fuentes, Carlos

46.

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.

47.

Reading a book is like re-writing it for yourself. You bring to a novel, anything you read, all your experience of the world. You bring your history and you read it in your own terms.

Carter, Angela

48.

It is from books that wise people derive consolation in the troubles of life.

Hugo, Victor

49.

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

50.

No one can read with profit that which he cannot learn to read with pleasure.

Porter, Noah