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

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

Lichtenberg, Georg C.

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

One half who graduate from college never read another book.

True, Herbert

The book to read is not the one which thinks for you, but the one which makes you think. No book in the world equals the Bible for that.

Mccosh

To buy books would be a good thing if we also could buy the time to read them.

Schopenhauer, Arthur

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

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

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

Books are not men and yet they stay alive.

Benet, Stephen Vincent

10.

What gunpowder did for war the printing press has done for the mind.

Phillips, Wendell

11.

Books and marriage go ill together.

Moliere

12.

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

Disraeli, Benjamin

13.

Thy books should, like thy friends, not many be, yet such wherein men may thy judgment see.

Wycherley, William

14.

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

15.

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

16.

The chief knowledge that a man gets from reading books is the knowledge that very few of them are worth reading.

Mencken, H. L.

17.

Books are not absolutely dead things, but do contain a certain potency of life in them, to be as active as the soul whose progeny they are; they preserve, as in a vial, the purest efficacy and extraction of the living intellect that bred them.

Milton, John

18.

The reading of all good books is like a conversation with all the finest men of past centuries.

Descartes, Rene

19.

He that loves a book will never want a faithful friend, a wholesome counselor, a cheerful companion, an effectual comforter. By study, by reading, by thinking, one may innocently divert and pleasantly entertain himself, as in all weathers, as in all fortunes.

Barrow

20.

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

21.

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

Jackson, Holbrook

22.

To read too many books is harmful.

Zedong, Mao

23.

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

24.

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

Baker, Nicholson

25.

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

Kempis, Thomas

26.

My books are water; those of the great geniuses are wine -- everybody drinks water.

Twain, Mark

27.

Much reading is an oppression of the mind, and extinguishes the natural candle, which is the reason of so many senseless scholars in the world.

Penn, William

28.

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

29.

Prerequisite for rereadability in books: that they be forgettable.

Rostand, Jean

30.

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

Butler, Samuel

31.

You are wise, witty and wonderful, but you spend too much time reading this sort of stuff.

Critchfield, Jim

32.

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

33.

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

Wesley, John

34.

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

Temple, Sir William

35.

Every abridgement of a good book is a fool abridged.

Montaigne, Michel Eyquem De

36.

It is from books that wise people derive consolation in the troubles of life.

Hugo, Victor

37.

The flood of print has turned reading into a process of gulping rather than savoring

Chappell, Warren

38.

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

Harington, John

39.

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

Hunt, Leigh

40.

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

Hadas, Moses

41.

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

Porter, Noah

42.

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

43.

No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader.

Frost, Robert

44.

The age of the book is almost gone.

Steiner, George

45.

The pleasure of reading is doubled when one lives with another who shares the same books.

Mansfield, Katherine

46.

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

47.

Books, like friends, should be few and well chosen. Like friends, too, we should return to them again and again for, like true friends, they will never fail us -- never cease to instruct -- never cloy.

Colton, Charles Caleb

48.

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

Channing, William Ellery

49.

I wish I could write a beautiful book to break those hearts that are soon to cease to exist: a book of faith and small neat worlds and of people who live by the philosophies of popular songs.

50.

The classics are only primitive literature. They belong to the same class as primitive machinery and primitive music and primitive medicine.

Leacock, Stephen B.