Motivational Quotes

Books - reading

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

- Morely, John

Best Quotes about Books - reading

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

Chesterton, Gilbert K.

There are two kinds of books. Those that no one reads and those that no one ought to read.

Mencken, H. L.

How can you dare teach a man to read until you've taught him everything else first?

Shaw, George Bernard

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.

Miss a meal if you have to, but don't miss a book.

Rohn, Jim

Read as you taste fruit or savor wine, or enjoy friendship, love or life.

Jackson, Holbrook

The last thing one discovers in composing a work is what to put first.

Pascal, Blaise

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

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

10.

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

Rohn, Jim

11.

To learn to read is to light a fire; every syllable that is spelled out is a spark.

Hugo, Victor

12.

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

Baker, Nicholson

13.

Only a generation of readers will span a generation of writers.

Spielberg, Steven

14.

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.

15.

To read too many books is harmful.

Zedong, Mao

16.

If a secret history of books could be written, and the author's private thoughts and meanings noted down alongside of his story, how many insipid volumes would become interesting, and dull tales excite the reader!

Thackeray, William M.

17.

You can either read something many times in order to be assured that you got it all, or else you can define your purpose and use techniques which will assure that you have met it and gotten what you need.

Kump, Peter

18.

A vacuum of ideas affects people differently than a vacuum of air, otherwise readers of books would be constantly collapsing.

Lichtenberg, Georg C.

19.

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

20.

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

Lowell, James Russell

21.

It is books that teach us to refine our pleasures when young, and to recall them with satisfaction when we are old.

Hunt, Leigh

22.

You will, I am sure, agree with me that... if page 534 only finds us in the second chapter, the length of the first one must have been really intolerable.

Doyle, Sir Arthur Conan

23.

A novel is a mirror carried along a main road.

Stendhal, Henri B.

24.

What is reading, but silent conversation.

Landor, Walter Savage

25.

I am what libraries and librarians have made me, with little assistance from a professor of Greek and poets.

Sandwell, B. K.

26.

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

Coolio

27.

Books and marriage go ill together.

Moliere

28.

A book that is shut is but a block.

Fuller, Thomas

29.

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

30.

Old books, you know well, are books of the world's youth, and new books are the fruits of its age.

Holmes, Oliver Wendell

31.

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

32.

Some books leave us free and some books make us free.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

33.

Books are lighthouses erected in the great sea of time.

Whipple, Edwin P.

34.

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

35.

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

36.

When I get a little money, I buy books; and if any is left I buy food and clothes.

Erasmus, Desiderius

37.

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

38.

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

Maclennan, Hugh

39.

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

Butler, Samuel

40.

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

41.

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

42.

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

43.

I heard his library burned down and both books were destroyed -- and one of them hadn't even been colored in yet.

Dawkins, John

44.

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

45.

I always like to look on the optimistic side of life, but I am realistic enough to know that life is a complex matter.

Disney, Walt

46.

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

Brodsky, Joseph

47.

There are books so alive that you're always afraid that while you weren't reading, the book has gone and changed, has shifted like a river; while you went on living, it went on living too, and like a river moved on and moved away. No one has stepped twice into the same river. But did anyone ever step twice into the same book?

Tsvetaeva, Marina

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.

Americans will listen, but they do not care to read. War and Peace must wait for the leisure of retirement, which never really comes: meanwhile it helps to furnish the living room. Blockbusting fiction is bought as furniture. Unread, it maintains its value. Read, it looks like money wasted. Cunningly, Americans know that books contain a person, and they want the person, not the book.

Burgess, Anthony

50.

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