Motivational Quotes

Books - reading

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

- Morely, John

Best Quotes about Books - reading

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

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.

A novel points out that the world consists entirely of exceptions.

Carey, Joyce

In any situation, ask yourself: What strengths do I possess that can contribute towards accomplishing something in this situation? Then follow through.

For a good book has this quality, that it is not merely a petrifaction of its author, but that once it has been tossed behind, like Deucalion's little stone, it acquires a separate and vivid life of its own.

Lejeune, Caroline

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

Today a reader, tomorrow a leader.

Fusselman, W.

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

10.

I've never know any trouble than an hour's reading didn't assuage.

Secondat, Charles de

11.

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

12.

A book might be written on the injustice of the just.

Hope, Anthony

13.

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

14.

There is creative reading as well as creative writing.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

15.

To read too many books is harmful.

Zedong, Mao

16.

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

17.

Happy is he who has laid up in his youth, and held fast in all fortune, a genuine and passionate love for reading.

Choate, Rufus

18.

It does not follow because many books are written by persons born in America that there exists an American literature. Books which imitate or represent the thoughts and life of Europe do not constitute an American literature. Before such can exist, an original idea must animate this nation and fresh currents of life must call into life fresh thoughts along the shore.

Fuller, Margaret

19.

The reason that fiction is more interesting than any other form of literature, to those who really like to study people, is that in fiction the author can really tell the truth without humiliating himself.

Roosevelt, Eleanor

20.

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

Asimov, Isaac

21.

I am a part of everything that I have read.

Kieran, John

22.

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.

23.

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

Porter, Noah

24.

Footnotes are the finer-suckered surfaces that allow testicular paragraphs to hold fast to the wider reality of the library.

Baker, Nicholson

25.

Nine-tenths of the existing books are nonsense and the clever books are the refutation of that nonsense.

Disraeli, Benjamin

26.

Who ever converses among old books will be hard to please among the new.

Temple, Sir William

27.

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

Rohn, Jim

28.

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

Auden, W. H.

29.

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

30.

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

31.

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.

32.

Thank you for sending me a copy of your book -- I'll waste no time reading it.

Hadas, Moses

33.

The good parts of a book may be only something a writer is lucky enough to overhear or it may be the wreck of his whole damn life --and one is as good as the other.

Hemingway, Ernest

34.

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

Hood, Thomas

35.

Learning to read has been reduced to a process of mastering a series of narrow, specific, hierarchical skills. Where armed-forces recruits learn the components of a rifle or the intricacies of close order drill by the numbers, recruits to reading learn its mechanics sound by sound and word by word.

Gross, Jacquelyn

36.

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

37.

There are worse crimes than burning books. One of them is not reading them.

Brodsky, Joseph

38.

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

Butler, Samuel

39.

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.

40.

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

41.

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

42.

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

Montagu, Lady Mary Wortley

43.

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

44.

Most books today seemed to have been written overnight from books read the day before.

Chamfort, Sebastien-Roch Nicolas De

45.

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

Gibbon, Edward

46.

Many books require no thought from those who read them, and for a very simple reason: they made no such demand upon those who wrote them. Those works, therefore, are the most valuable, that set our thinking faculties in the fullest operation. understand them.

Clarendon

47.

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

Adler, Mortimer J.

48.

She could give herself up to the written word as naturally as a good dancer to music or a fine swimmer to water. The only difficulty was that after finishing the last sentence she was left with a feeling at once hollow and uncomfortably full. Exactly like indigestion.

Rhys, Jean

49.

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

Pound, Ezra

50.

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

Johnson, Samuel