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

Read good, big important things.

Noonan, Peggy

I always begin at the left with the opening word of the sentence and read toward the right and I recommend this method.

Thurber, James

Read, read, read. Read everything-- trash, classics, good and bad, and see how they do it. Just like a carpenter who works as an apprentice and studies the master. Read! You'll absorb it. Then write. If it is good, you'll find out. If it's not, throw it out the window.

Faulkner, William

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

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

Howells, William Dean

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

Barrett, E.S.

Very young children eat their books, literally devouring their contents. This is one reason for the scarcity of first editions of Alice in Wonderland and other favorites of the nursery.

Rosenbach, A. S. W.

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

The world may be full of fourth-rate writers but it's also full of fourth-rate readers.

Barstow, Stan

10.

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

Mencken, H. L.

11.

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''

12.

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

13.

Readers are plentiful: thinkers are rare.

Martineau, Harriet

14.

I am a part of everything that I have read.

Kieran, John

15.

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

Proverb, American

16.

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

Whitman, Walt

17.

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.

18.

Does there, I wonder, exist a being who has read all, or approximately all, that the person of average culture is supposed to have read, and that not to have read is a social sin? If such a being does exist, surely he is an old, a very old man.

Bennett, Arnold

19.

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.

20.

When I get a little money, I buy books; and if any is left I buy food and clothes.

Erasmus, Desiderius

21.

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.

22.

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

Pound, Ezra

23.

A novel is a mirror carried along a main road.

Stendhal, Henri B.

24.

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

Critchfield, Jim

25.

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

26.

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

Fuller, Margaret

27.

Reading a book is like re-writing it for yourself. You bring to a novel, anything you read, all your experience of the world. You bring your history and you read it in your own terms.

Carter, Angela

28.

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

29.

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

Faulkner, William

30.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

31.

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

32.

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

Camus, Albert

33.

Books are the best of things if well used; if abused, among the worst. They are good for nothing but to inspire. I had better never see a book than be warped by its attraction clean out of my own orbit, and made a satellite instead of a system.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

34.

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

Hadas, Moses

35.

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

Voltaire

36.

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

Descartes, Rene

37.

When a book raises your spirit, and inspires you with noble and manly thoughts, seek for no other test of its excellence. It is good, and made by a good workman.

Bruyere, Jean De La

38.

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

39.

The reason that fiction is more interesting than any other form of literature, to those who really like to study people, is that in fiction the author can really tell the truth without humiliating himself.

Roosevelt, Eleanor

40.

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

41.

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

42.

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

Wilde, Oscar

43.

In any situation, ask yourself: What strengths do I possess that can contribute towards accomplishing something in this situation? Then follow through.

44.

Hypocrite reader -- my fellow -- my brother!

Baudelaire, Charles

45.

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

Mcluhan, Marshall

46.

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

Mccay, James T.

47.

Books that you carry to the fire, and hold readily in your hand, are most useful after all.

Johnson, Samuel