Motivational Quotes

Books - reading

No one can read with profit that which he cannot learn to read with pleasure.

- Porter, Noah

Best Quotes about Books - reading

'Tis pleasant, sure, to see one's name in print; A book's a book, although there's nothing in it.

Byron, Lord

The pleasure of reading is doubled when one lives with another who shares the same books.

Mansfield, Katherine

Books had instant replay long before televised sports.

Williams, Bert

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

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

Howells, William Dean

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

Chappell, Warren

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

Lichtenberg, Georg C.

If I had my way books would not be written in English, but in an exceedingly difficult secret language that only skilled professional readers and story-tellers could interpret. Then people like you would have to go to public halls and pay good prices to hear the professionals decode and read the books aloud for you. This plan would have the advantage of scaring off all amateur authors, retired politicians, country doctors and I-Married-a-Midget writers who would not have the patience to learn the secret language.

Davies, Robertson

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

Rohn, Jim

10.

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

Hugo, Victor

11.

Readers are plentiful: thinkers are rare.

Martineau, Harriet

12.

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

Critchfield, Jim

13.

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

14.

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

15.

When I am dead, I hope it may be said: His sins were scarlet, but his books were read.

Belloc, Hilaire

16.

The lessons taught in great books are misleading. The commerce in life is rarely so simple and never so just.

Brookner, Anita

17.

We ought to reverence books; to look on them as useful and mighty things. If they are good and true, whether they are about religion, politics, farming, trade, law, or medicine, they are the message of Christ, the maker of all things -- the teacher of all truth.

Kingsley, Charles

18.

Books are lighthouses erected in the great sea of time.

Whipple, Edwin P.

19.

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.

20.

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

Leacock, Stephen B.

21.

When the book comes out it may hurt you -- but in order for me to do it, it had to hurt me first. I can only tell you about yourself as much as I can face about myself.

Baldwin, James

22.

Then I though of reading -- the nice and subtle happiness of reading ... this joy not dulled by age, this polite and unpunishable vice, this selfish, serene, lifelong intoxication.

Smith, Logan Pearsall

23.

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

Wilde, Oscar

24.

Surviving and thriving as a professional today demands two new approaches to the written word. First, it requires a new approach to orchestrating information, by skillfully choosing what to read and what to ignore. Second, it requires a new approach to integrating information, by reading faster and with greater comprehension.

Calano, Jimmy

25.

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''

26.

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.

27.

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.

28.

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

Secondat, Charles de

29.

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

Schopenhauer, Arthur

30.

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

31.

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

Barrett, E.S.

32.

All good books are alike in that they are truer than if they had really happened and after you are finished reading one you will feel that all that happened to you and afterwards it all belongs to you; the good and the bad, the ecstasy, the remorse, and sorrow, the people and the places and how the weather was.

Hemingway, Ernest

33.

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

Brodsky, Joseph

34.

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

35.

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

36.

Books succeed, and lives fail.

Browning, Elizabeth Barrett

37.

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

38.

Every abridgement of a good book is a fool abridged.

Montaigne, Michel Eyquem De

39.

A great book should leave you with many experiences and slightly exhausted at the end. You should live several lives while reading it.

Styron, William

40.

As writers become more numerous, it is natural for readers to become more indolent; whence must necessarily arise a desire of attaining knowledge with the greatest possible ease.

Goldsmith, Oliver

41.

What is the most precious, the most exciting smell awaiting you in the house when you return to it after a dozen years or so? The smell of roses, you think? No, moldering books.

Sinyavsky, Andre

42.

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

Bulwer-Lytton, Edward G.

43.

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

Camus, Albert

44.

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

45.

What is important is not to be able to read rapidly, but to be able to decide what not to read.

Mccay, James T.

46.

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

Hadas, Moses

47.

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

Gibbon, Edward

48.

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.

49.

If I have not read a book before, it is, for all intents and purposes, new to me whether it was printed yesterday or three hundred years ago.

Hazlitt, William

50.

Our high respect for a well read person is praise enough for literature.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo