Motivational Quotes

Books - reading

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

Best Quotes about Books - reading

There is creative reading as well as creative writing.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

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

I feel a kind of reverence for the first books of young authors. There is so much aspiration in them, so much audacious hope and trembling fear, so much of the heart's history, that all errors and shortcomings are for a while lost sight of in the amiable self assertion of youth.

Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth

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

Luther, Martin

Read nothing that you do not care to remember, and remember nothing you do not mean to use.

Blackie, Professor

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

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

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

A novel is never anything, but a philosophy put into images.

Camus, Albert

10.

A bad book is as much of a labor to write as a good one; it comes as sincerely from the author's soul.

Huxley, Aldous

11.

Begin to read a book that will help you move toward your dream.

Brown, Les

12.

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

Maugham, W. Somerset

13.

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

Lichtenberg, Georg C.

14.

In the dark colony of night, when I consider man's magnificent capacity for malice, madness, folly, envy, rage, and destructiveness, and I wonder whether we shall not end up as breakfast for newts and polyps, I seem to hear the muffled cries of all the words in all the books with covers closed.

Rosten, Leo

15.

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

16.

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

Twain, Mark

17.

Prerequisite for rereadability in books: that they be forgettable.

Rostand, Jean

18.

Then I though of reading -- the nice and subtle happiness of reading ... this joy not dulled by age, this polite and unpunishable vice, this selfish, serene, lifelong intoxication.

Smith, Logan Pearsall

19.

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

Spielberg, Steven

20.

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

21.

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

22.

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

23.

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

Pound, Ezra

24.

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

Montagu, Lady Mary Wortley

25.

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

Schopenhauer, Arthur

26.

Books are the best of things if well used; if abused, among the worst. They are good for nothing but to inspire. I had better never see a book than be warped by its attraction clean out of my own orbit, and made a satellite instead of a system.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

27.

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

Critchfield, Jim

28.

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

Maclennan, Hugh

29.

What is a diary as a rule? A document useful to the person who keeps it. Dull to the contemporary who reads it and invaluable to the student, centuries afterwards, who treasures it.

Terry, Helen

30.

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

31.

The man who does not read books has no advantage over the man that can not read them.

Twain, Mark

32.

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

33.

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

Parker, Dorothy

34.

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.

35.

He has only half learned the art of reading who has not added to it the more refined art of skipping and skimming.

Balfour, Arthur James

36.

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

37.

Books succeed, and lives fail.

Browning, Elizabeth Barrett

38.

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

39.

Books are the blessed chloroform of the mind.

Chambers, Robert

40.

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

Phillips, Wendell

41.

A novel is a mirror carried along a main road.

Stendhal, Henri B.

42.

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

43.

What is the most precious, the most exciting smell awaiting you in the house when you return to it after a dozen years or so? The smell of roses, you think? No, moldering books.

Sinyavsky, Andre

44.

A book is like a man -- clever and dull, brave and cowardly, beautiful and ugly. For every flowering thought there will be a page like a wet and mangy mongrel, and for every looping flight a tap on the wing and a reminder that wax cannot hold the feathers firm too near the sun.

Steinbeck, John

45.

Orwell, George

46.

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

Descartes, Rene

47.

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

Pascal, Blaise

48.

Everything in this book may be wrong. [The Savior's Manual]

Bach, Richard