Motivational Quotes

Books - reading

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

- Pascal, Blaise

Best Quotes about Books - reading

The tools I need for my work are paper, tobacco, food, and a little whiskey.

Faulkner, William

Every abridgement of a good book is a fool abridged.

Montaigne, Michel Eyquem De

Reading makes immigrants of us all. It takes us away from home, but more important, it finds homes for us everywhere.

Rochman, Hazel

The books that the world calls immoral are the books that show the world its own shame.

Wilde, Oscar

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

Camus, Albert

Readers are plentiful: thinkers are rare.

Martineau, Harriet

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

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

Howells, William Dean

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

Hope, Anthony

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.

Any book that helps a child to form a habit of reading, to make reading one of his deep and continuing needs, is good for him.

McKenna, Richard

12.

The most foolish kind of a book is a kind of leaky boat on the sea of wisdom; some of the wisdom will get in anyhow.

Holmes, Oliver Wendell

13.

She could give herself up to the written word as naturally as a good dancer to music or a fine swimmer to water. The only difficulty was that after finishing the last sentence she was left with a feeling at once hollow and uncomfortably full. Exactly like indigestion.

Rhys, Jean

14.

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

Blackie, Professor

15.

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

Montagu, Lady Mary Wortley

16.

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

Ruskin, John

17.

Next, in importance to books are their titles.

Davies, Paul

18.

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

Twain, Mark

19.

I divide all readers into two classes: those who read to remember and those who read to forget.

Phelps, William Lyon

20.

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

Hubbard, Elbert

21.

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.

22.

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

Frost, Robert

23.

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

24.

One sheds one's sicknesses in books -- repeats and presents again one's emotions, to be master of them.

Lawrence, D. H.

25.

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

Channing, William Ellery

26.

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

27.

Books are not men and yet they stay alive.

Benet, Stephen Vincent

28.

I heard his library burned down and both books were destroyed -- and one of them hadn't even been colored in yet.

Dawkins, John

29.

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.

30.

No story is the same to us after a lapse of time; or rather we who read it are no longer the same interpreters.

Eliot, George

31.

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

32.

I suggest that the only books that influence us are those for which we are ready, and which have gone a little further down our particular path than we have yet got ourselves.

Forster, Edward M.

33.

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

Pound, Ezra

34.

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

35.

You will find most books worth reading are worth reading twice.

Morely, John

36.

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

37.

The Brahmins say that in their books there are many predictions of times in which it will rain. But press those books as strongly as you can, you can not get out of them a drop of water. So you can not get out of all the books that contain the best precepts the smallest good deed.

Tolstoy, Count Leo

38.

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

Descartes, Rene

39.

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

Brown, Les

40.

There are worse crimes than burning books. One of them is not reading them.

Brodsky, Joseph

41.

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

Schopenhauer, Arthur

42.

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

Whitman, Walt

43.

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

44.

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

Critchfield, Jim

45.

To learn to read is to light a fire; every syllable that is spelled out is a spark.

Hugo, Victor

46.

Americans will listen, but they do not care to read. War and Peace must wait for the leisure of retirement, which never really comes: meanwhile it helps to furnish the living room. Blockbusting fiction is bought as furniture. Unread, it maintains its value. Read, it looks like money wasted. Cunningly, Americans know that books contain a person, and they want the person, not the book.

Burgess, Anthony

47.

Digressions, incontestably, are the sunshine; they are the life, the soul of reading! Take them out of this book, for instance, --you might as well take the book along with them; --one cold external winter would reign in every page of it; restore them to the writer; --he steps forth like a bridegroom, --bids All-hail; brings in variety, and forbids the appetite to fail.

Sterne, Laurence

48.

When a book raises your spirit, and inspires you with noble and manly thoughts, seek for no other test of its excellence. It is good, and made by a good workman.

Bruyere, Jean De La

49.

Ideally a book would have no order to it, and the reader would have to discover his own.

Vaneigem, Raoul

50.

Book love... is your pass to the greatest, the purest, and the most perfect pleasure that God has prepared for His creatures.

Trollope, Anthony