Motivational Quotes

Books - reading

Every abridgement of a good book is a fool abridged.

- Montaigne, Michel Eyquem De

Best Quotes about Books - reading

I feel like I'm drowning. Every night, I'm carrying home loads of things to read but I'm too exhausted. I keep clipping things and Xeroxing them and planning to read them eventually, but I just end up throwing it all away and feeling guilty.

Levine, Ghita

Books are not men and yet they stay alive.

Benet, Stephen Vincent

Of all the ways of acquiring books, writing them oneself is regarded as the most praiseworthy method. Writers are really people who write books not because they are poor, but because they are dissatisfied with the books which they could buy but do not like.

Benjamin, Walter

Readers are plentiful: thinkers are rare.

Martineau, Harriet

Fiction reveals truth that reality obscures.

West, Jessamyn

Don't just read the easy stuff. You may be entertained by it, but you will never grow from it.

Rohn, Jim

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

Murray, William

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

Phelps, William Lyon

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

10.

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

11.

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

12.

A book that is shut is but a block.

Fuller, Thomas

13.

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.

14.

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

15.

The lessons taught in great books are misleading. The commerce in life is rarely so simple and never so just.

Brookner, Anita

16.

I know every book of mine by its smell, and I have but to put my nose between the pages to be reminded of all sorts of things.

Gissing, George Robert

17.

Reading the Scriptures is an uplifting experience.

18.

Once we have learned to read, meaning of words can somehow register without consciousness.

Marcel, Anthony

19.

Books are lighthouses erected in the great sea of time.

Whipple, Edwin P.

20.

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

Faulkner, William

21.

Don't ask me who's influenced me. A lion is made up of the lambs he's digested, and I've been reading all my life.

Seferis, Giorgos

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.

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

Camus, Albert

24.

The mortality of all inanimate things is terrible to me, but that of books most of all.

Howells, William Dean

25.

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

Schopenhauer, Arthur

26.

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

27.

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

28.

The Bible remained for me a book of books, still divine -- but divine in the sense that all great books are divine which teach men how to live righteously.

Keith, Sir Arthur

29.

My early and invincible love of reading I would not exchange for all the riches of India.

Gibbon, Edward

30.

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

31.

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.

32.

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

33.

If I had my way books would not be written in English, but in an exceedingly difficult secret language that only skilled professional readers and story-tellers could interpret. Then people like you would have to go to public halls and pay good prices to hear the professionals decode and read the books aloud for you. This plan would have the advantage of scaring off all amateur authors, retired politicians, country doctors and I-Married-a-Midget writers who would not have the patience to learn the secret language.

Davies, Robertson

34.

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.

35.

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

Wilde, Oscar

36.

To feel most beautifully alive means to be reading something beautiful, ready always to apprehend in the flow of language the sudden flash of poetry.

Bachelard, Gaston

37.

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

38.

Reading furnishes the mind only with material for knowledge; it is thinking that makes what we read ours.

Locke, John

39.

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

Morely, John

40.

No furniture is so charming as books.

Smith, Sydney

41.

The reason a writer writes a book is to forget a book and the reason a reader reads one is to remember it.

Wolfe, Thomas

42.

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

Harington, John

43.

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

44.

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

Frost, Robert

45.

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

46.

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

47.

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

Luther, Martin

48.

A multitude of books distracts the mind.

Socrates

49.

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

Voltaire

50.

Beware of the person of one book.