Motivational Quotes

Books - reading

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

- Murray, William

Best Quotes about Books - reading

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

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

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

Vaneigem, Raoul

Everything you need for better future and success has already been written. And guess what? All you have to do is go to the library.

Rohn, Jim

There is more treasure in books than in all the pirates loot on Treasure Island and best of all, you can enjoy these riches every day of your life.

Disney, Walt

Books and marriage go ill together.

Moliere

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

Fiction reveals truth that reality obscures.

West, Jessamyn

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

10.

This is not a book. This is libel, slander, defamation of character. This is not a book, in the ordinary sense of the word. No, this is a prolonged insult, a gob of spit in the face of Art, a kick in the pants to God, Man, Destiny, Time, Love, Beauty... what you will. I am going to sing for you, a little off key perhaps, but I will sing.

Miller, Henry

11.

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

12.

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

Murray, William

13.

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

Baker, Nicholson

14.

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

15.

A house without books is like a room without windows. No man has a right to bring up his children without surrounding them with books, if he has the means to buy them. It is a wrong to his family. Children learn to read by being in the presence of books. The love of knowledge comes with reading and grows upon it. And the love of knowledge, in a young mind, is almost always a warrant against the inferior excitement of passions and vices.

Mann, Horace

16.

Somewhere, everywhere, now hidden, now apparent in what ever is written down, is the form of a human being. If we seek to know him, are we idly occupied?

Woolf, Virginia

17.

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

Sandwell, B. K.

18.

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

Butler, Samuel

19.

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

Ruskin, John

20.

If I have not read a book before, it is, for all intents and purposes, new to me whether it was printed yesterday or three hundred years ago.

Hazlitt, William

21.

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

Fuller, Margaret

22.

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

Bevan, Aneurin

23.

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

Faulkner, William

24.

I would sooner read a timetable or a catalog than nothing at all.

Maugham, W. Somerset

25.

Books had instant replay long before televised sports.

Williams, Bert

26.

Read, read, read. Read everything-- trash, classics, good and bad, and see how they do it. Just like a carpenter who works as an apprentice and studies the master. Read! You'll absorb it. Then write. If it is good, you'll find out. If it's not, throw it out the window.

Faulkner, William

27.

Prerequisite for rereadability in books: that they be forgettable.

Rostand, Jean

28.

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

Dawkins, John

29.

Today a reader, tomorrow a leader.

Fusselman, W.

30.

The books one reads in childhood, and perhaps most of all the bad and good bad books, create in one's mind a sort of false map of the world, a series of fabulous countries into which one can retreat at odd moments throughout the rest of life, and which in some cases can survive a visit to the real countries which they are supposed to represent.

Orwell, George

31.

Next, in importance to books are their titles.

Davies, Paul

32.

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.

33.

Books are men of higher stature; the only men that speak aloud for future times to hear.

Barrett, E.S.

34.

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

Parker, Dorothy

35.

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

Porter, Noah

36.

There is a set of religious, or rather moral, writings which teach that virtue is the certain road to happiness, and vice to misery in this world. A very wholesome and comfortable doctrine, and to which we have but one objection, namely, that it is not true.

Fielding, Henry

37.

When you reread a classic, you do not see more in the book than you did before; you see more in you than there was before.

Fadiman, Clifton

38.

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

Spielberg, Steven

39.

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

Auden, W. H.

40.

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

Mcluhan, Marshall

41.

After all manner of professors have done their best for us, the place we are to get knowledge is in books. The true university of these days is a collection of books.

Carlyle, Thomas

42.

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

Schopenhauer, Arthur

43.

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

Marcel, Anthony

44.

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

45.

The books we read should be chosen with great care, that they may be, as an Egyptian king wrote over his library, The medicines of the soul.

Hood, Paxton

46.

God be thanked for books; they are the voices of the distant and the dead, and make us heirs of the spiritual life of past ages.

Channing, William Ellery

47.

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

Lichtenberg, Georg C.

48.

All my good reading, you might say, was done in the toilet. There are passages in Ulysses which can be read only in the toilet -- if one wants to extract the full flavor of their content.

Miller, Henry

49.

I love to lose myself in other men's minds. When I am not walking, I am reading. I cannot sit and think; books think for me.

Lamb, Charles

50.

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

Secondat, Charles de