Motivational Quotes

Books - reading

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

- Pound, Ezra

Best Quotes about Books - reading

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

Who ever converses among old books will be hard to please among the new.

Temple, Sir William

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

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

Harington, John

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

Byron, Lord

When you reread a classic, you do not see more in the book than you did before; you see more in you than there was before.

Fadiman, Clifton

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

Frost, Robert

We should be as careful of the books we read, as of the company we keep. The dead very often have more power than the living.

Edwards, Tryon

Books and marriage go ill together.

Moliere

10.

A multitude of books distracts the mind.

Socrates

11.

Don't ask me who's influenced me. A lion is made up of the lambs he's digested, and I've been reading all my life.

Seferis, Giorgos

12.

A book is like a man -- clever and dull, brave and cowardly, beautiful and ugly. For every flowering thought there will be a page like a wet and mangy mongrel, and for every looping flight a tap on the wing and a reminder that wax cannot hold the feathers firm too near the sun.

Steinbeck, John

13.

My books are water; those of the great geniuses are wine -- everybody drinks water.

Twain, Mark

14.

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

Hope, Anthony

15.

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

Carey, Joyce

16.

After all, the world is not a stage -- not to me: nor a theatre: nor a show-house of any sort. And art, especially novels, are not little theatres where the reader sits aloft and watches... and sighs, commiserates, condones and smiles. That's what you want a book to be: because it leaves you so safe and superior, with your two-dollar ticket to the show. And that's what my books are not and never will be. Whoever reads me will be in the thick of the scrimmage, and if he doesn't like it -- if he wants a safe seat in the audience -- let him read someone else.

Lawrence, D. H.

17.

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

18.

I used to walk to school with my nose buried in a book.

Coolio

19.

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

Twain, Mark

20.

I divide all readers into two classes: those who read to remember and those who read to forget.

Phelps, William Lyon

21.

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

Pound, Ezra

22.

I feel a kind of reverence for the first books of young authors. There is so much aspiration in them, so much audacious hope and trembling fear, so much of the heart's history, that all errors and shortcomings are for a while lost sight of in the amiable self assertion of youth.

Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth

23.

Prerequisite for rereadability in books: that they be forgettable.

Rostand, Jean

24.

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

25.

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

Murray, William

26.

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

27.

The age of the book is almost gone.

Steiner, George

28.

Books are divided into two classes, the books of the hour and the books of all time.

Ruskin, John

29.

What is a diary as a rule? A document useful to the person who keeps it. Dull to the contemporary who reads it and invaluable to the student, centuries afterwards, who treasures it.

Terry, Helen

30.

Books are not men and yet they stay alive.

Benet, Stephen Vincent

31.

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

Joubert, Joseph

32.

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

Wilde, Oscar

33.

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

34.

Early in the morning, at break of day, in all the freshness and dawn of one's strength, to read a book --I call that vicious!

Nietzsche, Friedrich

35.

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.

36.

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

Brodsky, Joseph

37.

You should read books like you take medicine, by advice, and not by advertisement.

Ruskin, John

38.

A book that is shut is but a block.

Fuller, Thomas

39.

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

Locke, John

40.

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

Mencken, H. L.

41.

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

42.

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

Bulwer-Lytton, Edward G.

43.

It does not follow because many books are written by persons born in America that there exists an American literature. Books which imitate or represent the thoughts and life of Europe do not constitute an American literature. Before such can exist, an original idea must animate this nation and fresh currents of life must call into life fresh thoughts along the shore.

Fuller, Margaret

44.

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

45.

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

46.

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

47.

Books are lighthouses erected in the great sea of time.

Whipple, Edwin P.

48.

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

49.

We are too civil to books. For a few golden sentences we will turn over and actually read a volume of four or five hundred pages.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

50.

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