Motivational Quotes

Books - reading

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

- Phillips, Wendell

Best Quotes about Books - reading

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

Shaw, George Bernard

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.

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

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

Rochman, Hazel

The worst readers are those who behave like plundering troops: they take away a few things they can use, dirty and confound the remainder, and revile the whole.

Nietzsche, Friedrich

After all manner of professors have done their best for us, the place we are to get knowledge is in books. The true university of these days is a collection of books.

Carlyle, Thomas

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

Rohn, Jim

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

Voltaire

Books succeed, and lives fail.

Browning, Elizabeth Barrett

10.

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

Barrett, E.S.

11.

There is no such thing as a moral book or an immoral book. Books are well written or badly written. That is all.

Wilde, Oscar

12.

The things I want to know are in books; my best friend is the man who'll get me a book I ain't read.

Lincoln, Abraham

13.

A good book, in the language of the book-sellers, is a salable one; in that of the curious, a scarce one; in that of men of sense, a useful and instructive one.

Chambers, Oswald

14.

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

Blackie, Professor

15.

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

16.

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

Dane, Frank

17.

Books give not wisdom where none was before. But where some is, there reading makes it more.

Harington, John

18.

Here, my dear Lucy, hide these books. Quick, quick! Fling Peregrine Pickle under the toilette --throw Roderick Random into the closet --put The Innocent Adultery into The Whole Duty of Man; thrust Lord Aimworth under the sofa! cram Ovid behind the bolster; there --put The Man of Feeling into your pocket. Now for them.

Sheridan, Richard Brinsley

19.

A library is thought in cold storage.

Samuel, Herbert

20.

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

Twain, Mark

21.

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

Colton, Charles Caleb

22.

What we become depends on what we read after all the professors have finished with us. The greatest university of all is the collection of books.

Carlyle, Thomas

23.

A bad book is the worse that it cannot repent. It has not been the devil's policy to keep the masses of mankind in ignorance; but finding that they will read, he is doing all in his power to poison their books.

Kirk, E.N.

24.

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''

25.

All the best stories in the world are but one story in reality -- the story of escape. It is the only thing which interests us all and at all times, how to escape.

Benson, Arthur Christopher

26.

Tradition is but a meteor, which, if it once falls, cannot be rekindled. Memory, once interrupted, is not to be recalled. But written learning is a fixed luminary, which, after the cloud that had hidden it has passed away, is again bright in its proper station. So books are faithful repositories, which may be awhile neglected or forgotten, but when opened again, will again impart instruction.

Johnson

27.

Everything you need for better future and success has already been written. And guess what? All you have to do is go to the library.

Rohn, Jim

28.

I always like to look on the optimistic side of life, but I am realistic enough to know that life is a complex matter.

Disney, Walt

29.

Readers are less and less seen as mere non-writers, the subhuman other or flawed derivative of the author; the lack of a pen is no longer a shameful mark of secondary status but a positively enabling space, just as within every writer can be seen to lurk, as a repressed but contaminating antithesis, a reader.

Eagleton, Terry

30.

To read well, that is, to read true books in a true spirit, is a noble exercise, and one that will task the reader more than any other exercise which the customs of the day esteem. It requires a training such as the athletes underwent, the steady intention almost of the whole life to this object.

Thoreau, Henry David

31.

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

32.

Books had instant replay long before televised sports.

Williams, Bert

33.

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

34.

Some books leave us free and some books make us free.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

35.

I know every book of mine by its smell, and I have but to put my nose between the pages to be reminded of all sorts of things.

Gissing, George Robert

36.

A bibliophile of little means is likely to suffer often. Books don't slip from his hands but fly past him through the air, high as birds, high as prices.

Neruda, Pablo

37.

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

Auden, W. H.

38.

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

39.

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

Gibbon, Edward

40.

No matter how busy you may think you are, you must find time for reading, or surrender yourself to self-chosen ignorance.

Townsend, Atwood H.

41.

There are very many people who read simply to prevent themselves from thinking.

Lichtenberg, Georg C.

42.

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

43.

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

Mallarme, Stephane

44.

One half who graduate from college never read another book.

True, Herbert

45.

Beware of the person of one book.

Aquinas, St. Thomas

46.

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

47.

A successful book cannot afford to be more than ten percent new.

Mcluhan, Marshall

48.

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

Maclennan, Hugh

49.

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

Camus, Albert

50.

Thank you for sending me a copy of your book -- I'll waste no time reading it.