Motivational Quotes

Books - reading

Five daily newspapers arrive in my California driveway. The New York times and the Wall Street Journal are supplemented by three local papers. As for magazines, I read, or at least skim, Business Week, Forbes, The Economist, INC; Industry Week, Fortune. Other subscriptions include Sales and Marketing Management, Modern Health Care, Progressive Grocer, High Tech Business, and Slaon Management Review from MIT. I religiously read Business Tokyo, Asia Week, and Far Eastern Economic Review. I glance at Newsweek and Time ... but I devour the New Republic, Policy Review, Foreign Affairs, The Washington Monthly, and Public Interest. How about books? A dozen or more each month.

- Peters, Thomas J.

Best Quotes about Books - reading

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

Whitman, Walt

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

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

Hugo, Victor

I am what libraries and librarians have made me, with little assistance from a professor of Greek and poets.

Sandwell, B. K.

'Tis the good reader that makes the good book; in every book he finds passages which seem to be confidences or sides hidden from all else and unmistakably meant for his ear; the profit of books is according to the sensibility of the reader; the profound thought or passion sleeps as in a mine, until it is discovered by an equal mind and heart.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

In the case of good books, the point is not how many of them you can get through, but rather how many can get through to you.

Adler, Mortimer J.

Read good, big important things.

Noonan, Peggy

Books had instant replay long before televised sports.

Williams, Bert

Read as you taste fruit or savor wine, or enjoy friendship, love or life.

Jackson, Holbrook

10.

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

Millay, Edna St. Vincent

11.

A big leather-bound volume makes an ideal razor strap. A thin book is useful to stick under a table with a broken caster to steady it. A large, flat atlas can be used to cover a window with a broken pane. And a thick, old-fashioned heavy book with a clasp is the finest thing in the world to throw at a noisy cat.

Twain, Mark

12.

A multitude of books distracts the mind.

Socrates

13.

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

14.

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

15.

Books are the blessed chloroform of the mind.

Chambers, Robert

16.

Books are lighthouses erected in the great sea of time.

Whipple, Edwin P.

17.

The newest books are those that never grow old.

Jackson, George Holbrook

18.

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

19.

I am not a speed reader. I am a speed understander.

Asimov, Isaac

20.

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

Lytton, Lord Edward

21.

Prerequisite for rereadability in books: that they be forgettable.

Rostand, Jean

22.

Books are men of higher stature; the only men that speak aloud for future times to hear.

Barrett, E.S.

23.

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

24.

Fiction reveals truth that reality obscures.

West, Jessamyn

25.

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

26.

A book may be compared to your neighbor: if it be good, it cannot last too long; if bad, you cannot get rid of it too early.

Brooke, Rupert

27.

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

28.

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

29.

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

Gibbon, Edward

30.

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

31.

The constant habit of perusing devout books is so indispensable, that it has been termed the oil of the lamp of prayer. Too much reading, however, and too little meditation, may produce the effect of a lamp inverted; which is extinguished by the very excess of that ailment, whose property is to feed it.

More, Hannah

32.

I don't think any good book is based on factual experience. Bad books are about things the writer already knew before he wrote them.

Fuentes, Carlos

33.

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

Mallarme, Stephane

34.

For a good book has this quality, that it is not merely a petrifaction of its author, but that once it has been tossed behind, like Deucalion's little stone, it acquires a separate and vivid life of its own.

Lejeune, Caroline

35.

Next to acquiring good friends, the best acquisition is that of good books.

Colton, Charles Caleb

36.

Many books require no thought from those who read them, and for a very simple reason: they made no such demand upon those who wrote them. Those works, therefore, are the most valuable, that set our thinking faculties in the fullest operation. understand them.

Clarendon

37.

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

38.

Read Homer once, and you can read no more. For all books else appear so mean, and so poor. Verse will seem prose; but still persist to read, and Homer will be all the books you need.

Buckingham, Duke of

39.

A real book is not one that we read, but one that reads us.

Auden, W. H.

40.

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

Frost, Robert

41.

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

Ruskin, John

42.

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

Fuller, Margaret

43.

The mere brute pleasure of reading --the sort of pleasure a cow must have in grazing.

Chesterton, Gilbert K.

44.

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

Pascal, Blaise

45.

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

Luther, Martin

46.

Every abridgement of a good book is a fool abridged.

Montaigne, Michel Eyquem De

47.

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

48.

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

49.

How many a man has dated a new era in his life from the reading of a book! The book exists for us, perchance, that will explain our miracles and reveal new ones. The at present unutterable things we may find somewhere uttered.

Thoreau, Henry David

50.

Reading is equivalent to thinking with someone else's head instead of with one's own.

Schopenhauer, Arthur