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

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

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

Pound, Ezra

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

Porter, Noah

With one day's reading a man may have the key in his hands.

Pound, Ezra

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

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

Phillips, Wendell

This will never be a civilized country until we expend more money for books than we do for chewing gum.

Hubbard, Elbert

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

Coolio

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

Erasmus, Desiderius

10.

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

11.

A person who publishes a book appears willfully in public with his pants down.

Millay, Edna St. Vincent

12.

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

13.

A wicked book cannot repent.

Proverb

14.

A library is thought in cold storage.

Samuel, Herbert

15.

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

Voltaire

16.

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

17.

The great American novel has not only already been written, it has already been rejected.

Dane, Frank

18.

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

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.

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

21.

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

22.

Books and marriage go ill together.

Moliere

23.

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

Locke, John

24.

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

25.

In science, read by preference the newest works. In literature, read the oldest. The classics are always modern.

Lytton, Lord Edward

26.

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

Murray, William

27.

People are much more willing to lend you books than bookcases.

Twain, Mark

28.

I feel like I'm drowning. Every night, I'm carrying home loads of things to read but I'm too exhausted. I keep clipping things and Xeroxing them and planning to read them eventually, but I just end up throwing it all away and feeling guilty.

Levine, Ghita

29.

Reading is to the mind what exercise is to the body. It is wholesome and bracing for the mind to have its faculties kept on the stretch.

Steele, Sir Richard

30.

The more sins you confess, the more books you will sell.

Proverb, American

31.

Prerequisite for rereadability in books: that they be forgettable.

Rostand, Jean

32.

Old books that have ceased to be of service should no more be abandoned than should old friends who have ceased to give pleasure.

Worsthorne, Sir Peregrine

33.

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.

34.

Until I feared I would lose it, I never loved to read. One does not love breathing.

Lee, Harper

35.

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

36.

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

37.

The books we think we ought to read are poky, dull, and dry; The books that we would like to read we are ashamed to buy; The books that people talk about we never can recall; And the books that people give us, oh, they're the worst of all.

Wells, Carolyn

38.

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

39.

Education... has produced a vast population able to read but unable to distinguish what is worth reading, an easy prey to sensations and cheap appeals.

Trevelyan, G. M.

40.

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

Frost, Robert

41.

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

42.

Beware of the person of one book.

Aquinas, St. Thomas

43.

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.

44.

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

45.

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

Rohn, Jim

46.

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

47.

The mortality of all inanimate things is terrible to me, but that of books most of all.

Howells, William Dean

48.

There are people who read too much: bibliobibuli. I know some who are constantly drunk on books, as other men are drunk on whiskey or religion. They wander through this most diverting and stimulating of worlds in a haze, seeing nothing and hearing nothing.

Mencken, H. L.

49.

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

Butler, Samuel

50.

The words of my book nothing, the drift of it everything.

Whitman, Walt