Motivational Quotes

Books - reading

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

- Phillips, Wendell

Best Quotes about Books - reading

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

Fiction reveals truth that reality obscures.

West, Jessamyn

The reading or non-reading a book will never keep down a single petticoat.

Byron, Lord

A book is a part of life, a manifestation of life, just as much as a tree or a horse or a star. It obeys its own rhythms, its own laws, whether it be a novel, a play, or a diary. The deep, hidden rhythm of life is always there -- that of the pulse, the heart beat.

Miller, Henry

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

Chesterton, Gilbert K.

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

Chappell, Warren

Books, books, books had found the secret of a garret-room piled high with cases in my father's name; Piled high, packed large, --where, creeping in and out among the giant fossils of my past, like some small nimble mouse between the ribs of a mastodon, I nibbled here and there at this or that box, pulling through the gap, in heats of terror, haste, victorious joy, the first book first. And how I felt it beat under my pillow, in the morning's dark. An hour before the sun would let me read! My books!

Browning, Elizabeth Barrett

I wish I could write a beautiful book to break those hearts that are soon to cease to exist: a book of faith and small neat worlds and of people who live by the philosophies of popular songs.

Happy is he who has laid up in his youth, and held fast in all fortune, a genuine and passionate love for reading.

Choate, Rufus

10.

The classics are only primitive literature. They belong to the same class as primitive machinery and primitive music and primitive medicine.

Leacock, Stephen B.

11.

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

Camus, Albert

12.

A bad book is as much of a labor to write as a good one; it comes as sincerely from the author's soul.

Huxley, Aldous

13.

I've never know any trouble than an hour's reading didn't assuage.

Secondat, Charles de

14.

There is no robber worse than a bad book.

Proverb, Italian

15.

To read too many books is harmful.

Zedong, Mao

16.

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

17.

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

18.

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

Shaw, George Bernard

19.

In science read the newest works, in literature read the oldest.

Bulwer-Lytton, Edward G.

20.

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

21.

A book that is shut is but a block.

Fuller, Thomas

22.

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

Rohn, Jim

23.

Read good, big important things.

Noonan, Peggy

24.

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

25.

There are books so alive that you're always afraid that while you weren't reading, the book has gone and changed, has shifted like a river; while you went on living, it went on living too, and like a river moved on and moved away. No one has stepped twice into the same river. But did anyone ever step twice into the same book?

Tsvetaeva, Marina

26.

No man understands a deep book until he has seen and lived at least part of its contents.

Pound, Ezra

27.

Beware of the person of one book.

Aquinas, St. Thomas

28.

Much reading is an oppression of the mind, and extinguishes the natural candle, which is the reason of so many senseless scholars in the world.

Penn, William

29.

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

Harington, John

30.

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

Trollope, Anthony

31.

A book worth reading is worth buying.

Ruskin, John

32.

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

Faulkner, William

33.

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

Wilde, Oscar

34.

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

Dawkins, John

35.

Books to judicious compilers, are useful; to particular arts and professions, they are absolutely necessary; to men of real science, they are tools: but more are tools to them.

Johnson

36.

Books are masters who instruct us without rods or ferules, without words or anger, without bread or money. If you approach them, they are not asleep; if you seek them, they do not hide; if you blunder, they do not scold; if you are ignorant, they do not laugh at you.

Bury, Richard De

37.

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

38.

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

Vaneigem, Raoul

39.

The books we read should be chosen with great care, that they may be, as an Egyptian king wrote over his library, The medicines of the soul.

Hood, Paxton

40.

A man ought to read just as his inclination leads him; for what he reads as a task will do him little good.

Johnson, Samuel

41.

Old books that have ceased to be of service should no more be abandoned than should old friends who have ceased to give pleasure.

Worsthorne, Sir Peregrine

42.

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

Dane, Frank

43.

Books had instant replay long before televised sports.

Williams, Bert

44.

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

45.

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

Morely, John

46.

This book is not to be tossed lightly aside, but to be hurled with great force.

Parker, Dorothy

47.

Everywhere I have sought rest and not found it, except sitting in a corner by myself with a little book.

Kempis, Thomas

48.

No furniture is so charming as books.

Smith, Sydney

49.

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.

50.

I read the newspaper avidly. It is my one form of continuous fiction.

Bevan, Aneurin