Motivational Quotes

Books - reading

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

- Phillips, Wendell

Best Quotes about Books - reading

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.

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

Joubert, Joseph

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

Luther, Martin

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

Hope, Anthony

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

Millay, Edna St. Vincent

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.

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.

The age of the book is almost gone.

Steiner, George

To read too many books is harmful.

Zedong, Mao

10.

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

Hugo, Victor

11.

If a secret history of books could be written, and the author's private thoughts and meanings noted down alongside of his story, how many insipid volumes would become interesting, and dull tales excite the reader!

Thackeray, William M.

12.

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

Murray, William

13.

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

Frost, Robert

14.

No furniture is so charming as books.

Smith, Sydney

15.

Somewhere, everywhere, now hidden, now apparent in what ever is written down, is the form of a human being. If we seek to know him, are we idly occupied?

Woolf, Virginia

16.

The real risks for any artist are taken in pushing the work to the limits of what is possible, in the attempt to increase the sum of what it is possible to think. Books become good when they go to this edge and risk falling over it --when they endanger the artist by reason of what he has, or has not, artistically dared.

Rushdie, Salman

17.

Reading furnishes the mind only with material for knowledge; it is thinking that makes what we read ours.

Locke, John

18.

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

Phillips, Wendell

19.

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

20.

A novel points out that the world consists entirely of exceptions.

Carey, Joyce

21.

He had read much, if one considers his long life; but his contemplation was much more than his reading. He was wont to say that if he had read as much as other men he should have known no more than other men.

Aubrey, John

22.

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.

23.

To feel most beautifully alive means to be reading something beautiful, ready always to apprehend in the flow of language the sudden flash of poetry.

Bachelard, Gaston

24.

Those who do not read are no better off than those who cannot read.

25.

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

Mallarme, Stephane

26.

The more sins you confess, the more books you will sell.

Proverb, American

27.

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

28.

Education... has produced a vast population able to read but unable to distinguish what is worth reading, an easy prey to sensations and cheap appeals.

Trevelyan, G. M.

29.

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

Hugo, Victor

30.

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.

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.

A wicked book cannot repent.

Proverb

33.

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

Vaneigem, Raoul

34.

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

35.

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

36.

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

37.

Miss a meal if you have to, but don't miss a book.

Rohn, Jim

38.

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

Dane, Frank

39.

Books and marriage go ill together.

Moliere

40.

Beware of the person of one book.

Aquinas, St. Thomas

41.

There is no robber worse than a bad book.

Proverb, Italian

42.

Do we write books so that they shall merely be read? Don't we also write them for employment in the household? For one that is read from start to finish, thousands are leafed through, other thousands lie motionless, others are jammed against mouseholes, thrown at rats, others are stood on, sat on, drummed on, have gingerbread baked on them or are used to light pipes.

Lichtenberg, Georg C.

43.

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

44.

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

Jackson, Holbrook

45.

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

Lichtenberg, Georg C.

46.

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

47.

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

Pound, Ezra

48.

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

Camus, Albert

49.

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

Descartes, Rene

50.

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