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

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

Erasmus, Desiderius

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

Brookner, Anita

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

Baker, Nicholson

How can you dare teach a man to read until you've taught him everything else first?

Shaw, George Bernard

Everything in the world exists to end up in a book.

Mallarme, Stephane

A novel is a mirror carried along a main road.

Stendhal, Henri B.

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

Bach, Richard

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

Gibbon, Edward

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

10.

Read good, big important things.

Noonan, Peggy

11.

After all, the world is not a stage -- not to me: nor a theatre: nor a show-house of any sort. And art, especially novels, are not little theatres where the reader sits aloft and watches... and sighs, commiserates, condones and smiles. That's what you want a book to be: because it leaves you so safe and superior, with your two-dollar ticket to the show. And that's what my books are not and never will be. Whoever reads me will be in the thick of the scrimmage, and if he doesn't like it -- if he wants a safe seat in the audience -- let him read someone else.

Lawrence, D. H.

12.

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

Hugo, Victor

13.

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

Brown, Les

14.

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

Lichtenberg, Georg C.

15.

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

Critchfield, Jim

16.

Reading the Scriptures is an uplifting experience.

17.

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

Butler, Samuel

18.

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

19.

Hypocrite reader -- my fellow -- my brother!

Baudelaire, Charles

20.

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

21.

A good book is the best of friends, the same today and for ever.

Tupper, Martin

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.

The world may be full of fourth-rate writers but it's also full of fourth-rate readers.

Barstow, Stan

24.

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

Disraeli, Benjamin

25.

Books are divided into two classes, the books of the hour and the books of all time.

Ruskin, John

26.

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

27.

We are too civil to books. For a few golden sentences we will turn over and actually read a volume of four or five hundred pages.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

28.

You will be the same person in five as you are today except for the people you meet and the books you read.

Jones, Charles ''Tremendous''

29.

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

30.

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

Belloc, Hilaire

31.

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

Murray, William

32.

A person of mature years and ripe development, who is expecting nothing from literature but the corroboration and renewal of past ideas, may find satisfaction in a lucidity so complete as to occasion no imaginative excitement, but young and ambitious students are not content with it. They seek the excitement because they are capable of the growth that it accompanies.

Cooley, Charles Horton

33.

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

Porter, Noah

34.

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

35.

Except a living man there is nothing more wonderful than a book! a message to us from the dead -- from human souls we never saw, who lived, perhaps, thousands of miles away. And yet these, in those little sheets of paper, speak to us, arouse us, terrify us, teach us, comfort us, open their hearts to us as brothers.

Kingsley, Charles

36.

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

Mencken, H. L.

37.

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

Coolio

38.

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.

39.

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

Channing, William Ellery

40.

A house is not a home unless it contains food and fire for the mind as well as the body.

Fuller, Margaret

41.

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

42.

You should read books like you take medicine, by advice, and not by advertisement.

Ruskin, John

43.

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

44.

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

Lichtenberg, Georg C.

45.

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.

46.

There is creative reading as well as creative writing.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

47.

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

48.

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

Chappell, Warren

49.

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

Millay, Edna St. Vincent

50.

There is a set of religious, or rather moral, writings which teach that virtue is the certain road to happiness, and vice to misery in this world. A very wholesome and comfortable doctrine, and to which we have but one objection, namely, that it is not true.

Fielding, Henry