Motivational Quotes

Books - reading

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

- Parker, Dorothy

Best Quotes about Books - reading

A library is thought in cold storage.

Samuel, Herbert

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

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

Spielberg, Steven

Fiction reveals truth that reality obscures.

West, Jessamyn

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

Brown, Les

My early and invincible love of reading I would not exchange for all the riches of India.

Gibbon, Edward

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

Today a reader, tomorrow a leader.

Fusselman, W.

Prerequisite for rereadability in books: that they be forgettable.

Rostand, Jean

10.

Of all the ways of acquiring books, writing them oneself is regarded as the most praiseworthy method. Writers are really people who write books not because they are poor, but because they are dissatisfied with the books which they could buy but do not like.

Benjamin, Walter

11.

Old books, you know well, are books of the world's youth, and new books are the fruits of its age.

Holmes, Oliver Wendell

12.

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

Mencken, H. L.

13.

One half who graduate from college never read another book.

True, Herbert

14.

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

Lee, Harper

15.

The lessons taught in great books are misleading. The commerce in life is rarely so simple and never so just.

Brookner, Anita

16.

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

17.

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

18.

A book might be written on the injustice of the just.

Hope, Anthony

19.

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

20.

There was a time when the world acted on books; now books act on the world.

Joubert, Joseph

21.

Books in a large university library system: 2, 000,000. Books in an average large city library: 1 0,000. Average number of books in a chain bookstore: 30, 000. Books in an average neighborhood branch library: 20, 000.

Horowitz, Lois

22.

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

23.

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

24.

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

25.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

26.

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

Channing, William Ellery

27.

The greatest gift is the passion for reading. It is cheap, it consoles, it distracts, it excites, it gives you knowledge of the world and experience of a wide kind. It is a moral illumination.

Hardwick, Elizabeth

28.

If I had my way books would not be written in English, but in an exceedingly difficult secret language that only skilled professional readers and story-tellers could interpret. Then people like you would have to go to public halls and pay good prices to hear the professionals decode and read the books aloud for you. This plan would have the advantage of scaring off all amateur authors, retired politicians, country doctors and I-Married-a-Midget writers who would not have the patience to learn the secret language.

Davies, Robertson

29.

The printing press is either the greatest blessing or the greatest curse of modern times, sometimes one forgets which it is.

Barrie, Sir James M.

30.

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

Lichtenberg, Georg C.

31.

There are two kinds of books. Those that no one reads and those that no one ought to read.

Mencken, H. L.

32.

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

33.

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

Twain, Mark

34.

When we read a story, we inhabit it. The covers of the book are like a roof and four walls. What is to happen next will take place within the four walls of the story. And this is possible because the story's voice makes everything its own.

Berger, John

35.

When I am dead, I hope it may be said: His sins were scarlet, but his books were read.

Belloc, Hilaire

36.

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

Howells, William Dean

37.

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

Critchfield, Jim

38.

If a book comes from the heart it will contrive to reach other hearts. All art and author craft are of small account to that.

Carlyle, Thomas

39.

The good parts of a book may be only something a writer is lucky enough to overhear or it may be the wreck of his whole damn life --and one is as good as the other.

Hemingway, Ernest

40.

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

41.

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

Maclennan, Hugh

42.

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

Pound, Ezra

43.

Every abridgement of a good book is a fool abridged.

Montaigne, Michel Eyquem De

44.

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

45.

A great book should leave you with many experiences and slightly exhausted at the end. You should live several lives while reading it.

Styron, William

46.

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

Phillips, Wendell

47.

The books that everybody admires are those that nobody reads.

France, Anatole

48.

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

49.

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

50.

The unread story is not a story; it is little black marks on wood pulp. The reader, reading it, makes it live: a live thing, a story.

Guin, Ursula K. Le