Motivational Quotes

Books - reading

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

Best Quotes about Books - reading

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

Luther, Martin

Some of the most famous books are the least worth reading. Their fame was due to their having done something that needed to be doing in their day. The work is done and the virtue of the book has expired.

Morely, John

Books are but waste paper unless we spend in action the wisdom we get from thought -- asleep. When we are weary of the living, we may repair to the dead, who have nothing of peevishness, pride, or design in their conversation.

Collier, Jeremy

Books are lighthouses erected in the great sea of time.

Whipple, Edwin P.

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

Locke, John

To sit alone in the lamplight with a book spread out before you hold intimate converse with men of unseen generations -- such is pleasure beyond compare.

Kenko, Yoshida

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

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

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

10.

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

11.

A multitude of books distracts the mind.

Socrates

12.

You've really got to start hitting the books because it's no joke out here.

Lee, Spike

13.

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

Chamfort, Sebastien-Roch Nicolas De

14.

A book is a mirror: If an ass peers into it, you can't expect an apostle to look out.

Lichtenberg, Georg C.

15.

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.

16.

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

Erasmus, Desiderius

17.

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

18.

We ought to reverence books; to look on them as useful and mighty things. If they are good and true, whether they are about religion, politics, farming, trade, law, or medicine, they are the message of Christ, the maker of all things -- the teacher of all truth.

Kingsley, Charles

19.

Our high respect for a well read person is praise enough for literature.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

20.

What is important is not to be able to read rapidly, but to be able to decide what not to read.

Mccay, James T.

21.

Books are standing counselors and preachers, always at hand, and always disinterested; having this advantage over oral instructors, that they are ready to repeat their lesson as often as we please.

Chambers, Oswald

22.

Today a reader, tomorrow a leader.

Fusselman, W.

23.

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

Gibbon, Edward

24.

Any book that helps a child to form a habit of reading, to make reading one of his deep and continuing needs, is good for him.

McKenna, Richard

25.

The reading or non-reading a book will never keep down a single petticoat.

Byron, Lord

26.

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

Wilde, Oscar

27.

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

28.

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

29.

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

30.

Readers are plentiful: thinkers are rare.

Martineau, Harriet

31.

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

32.

In science read the newest works, in literature read the oldest.

Bulwer-Lytton, Edward G.

33.

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.

34.

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

35.

Books had instant replay long before televised sports.

Williams, Bert

36.

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

Lowell, James Russell

37.

To use books rightly, is to go to them for help; to appeal to them when our own knowledge and power fail; to be led by them into wider sight and purer conception than our own, and to receive from them the united sentence of the judges and councils of all time, against our solitary and unstable opinions.

Ruskin, John

38.

Until it is kindled by a spirit as flamingly alive as the one which gave it birth a book is dead to us. Words divested of their magic are but dead hieroglyphs.

Miller, Henry

39.

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

40.

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

41.

'Tis pleasant, sure, to see one's name in print; A book's a book, although there's nothing in it.

Byron, Lord

42.

Everywhere I have sought rest and not found it, except sitting in a corner by myself with a little book.

Kempis, Thomas

43.

Beware you be not swallowed up in books! An ounce of love is worth a pound of knowledge.

Wesley, John

44.

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

Baker, Nicholson

45.

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

46.

The books one has written in the past have two surprises in store: one couldn't write them again, and wouldn't want to.

Rostand, Jean

47.

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

Channing, William Ellery

48.

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

Voltaire

49.

Read good, big important things.