Motivational Quotes

Books - reading

Every abridgement of a good book is a fool abridged.

- Montaigne, Michel Eyquem De

Best Quotes about Books - reading

Fiction reveals truth that reality obscures.

West, Jessamyn

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.

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.

Every man is a volume if you know how to read him.

Channing, William Ellery

The more sins you confess, the more books you will sell.

Proverb, American

A multitude of books distracts the mind.

Socrates

Ideally a book would have no order to it, and the reader would have to discover his own.

Vaneigem, Raoul

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.

One half who graduate from college never read another book.

True, Herbert

10.

The great American novel has not only already been written, it has already been rejected.

Dane, Frank

11.

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.

12.

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

13.

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

Brookner, Anita

14.

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

Marcel, Anthony

15.

The mere brute pleasure of reading --the sort of pleasure a cow must have in grazing.

Chesterton, Gilbert K.

16.

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

Maclennan, Hugh

17.

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.

18.

Next, in importance to books are their titles.

Davies, Paul

19.

Readers are plentiful: thinkers are rare.

Martineau, Harriet

20.

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

Rohn, Jim

21.

The age of the book is almost gone.

Steiner, George

22.

Early in the morning, at break of day, in all the freshness and dawn of one's strength, to read a book --I call that vicious!

Nietzsche, Friedrich

23.

A good title is the title of a successful book.

Chandler, Raymond

24.

Books are the best of things if well used; if abused, among the worst. They are good for nothing but to inspire. I had better never see a book than be warped by its attraction clean out of my own orbit, and made a satellite instead of a system.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

25.

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

Lowell, James Russell

26.

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

27.

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

28.

A successful book cannot afford to be more than ten percent new.

Mcluhan, Marshall

29.

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

Faulkner, William

30.

I read the newspaper avidly. It is my one form of continuous fiction.

Bevan, Aneurin

31.

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

Harington, John

32.

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

33.

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

Whitman, Walt

34.

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

35.

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

36.

A real book is not one that we read, but one that reads us.

Auden, W. H.

37.

The constant habit of perusing devout books is so indispensable, that it has been termed the oil of the lamp of prayer. Too much reading, however, and too little meditation, may produce the effect of a lamp inverted; which is extinguished by the very excess of that ailment, whose property is to feed it.

More, Hannah

38.

We should be as careful of the books we read, as of the company we keep. The dead very often have more power than the living.

Edwards, Tryon

39.

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

40.

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

Trollope, Anthony

41.

Those who do not read are no better off than those who cannot read.

42.

To read too many books is harmful.

Zedong, Mao

43.

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

44.

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

Murray, William

45.

No story is the same to us after a lapse of time; or rather we who read it are no longer the same interpreters.

Eliot, George

46.

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

47.

The best effect of any book, is that it excites the reader to self-activity.

Carlyle, Thomas

48.

From the moment I picked your book up until I laid it down I was convulsed with laughter. Some day I intend reading it.

Marx, Groucho

49.

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

Phelps, William Lyon

50.

A bad book is the worse that it cannot repent. It has not been the devil's policy to keep the masses of mankind in ignorance; but finding that they will read, he is doing all in his power to poison their books.

Kirk, E.N.