Motivational Quotes

Books - reading

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

- Pound, Ezra

Best Quotes about Books - reading

What is reading, but silent conversation.

Landor, Walter Savage

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

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

Hugo, Victor

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

Rohn, Jim

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

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

Voltaire

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

Most books, like their authors, are born to die; of only a few books can it be said that death has no dominion over them; they live, and their influence lives forever.

Swartz, J.

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

Jackson, Holbrook

10.

Next, in importance to books are their titles.

Davies, Paul

11.

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

12.

The only books that influence us are those for which we are ready, and which have gone a little farther down our particular path than we have yet got ourselves.

Forster, Edward M.

13.

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

14.

God be thanked for books; they are the voices of the distant and the dead, and make us heirs of the spiritual life of past ages.

Channing, William Ellery

15.

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

Howells, William Dean

16.

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

Hugo, Victor

17.

There is more treasure in books than in all the pirates loot on Treasure Island and best of all, you can enjoy these riches every day of your life.

Disney, Walt

18.

Books, like friends, should be few and well chosen. Like friends, too, we should return to them again and again for, like true friends, they will never fail us -- never cease to instruct -- never cloy.

Colton, Charles Caleb

19.

The things I want to know are in books; my best friend is the man who'll get me a book I ain't read.

Lincoln, Abraham

20.

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.

21.

The printing press is either the greatest blessing or the greatest curse of modern times, sometimes one forgets which it is.

Barrie, Sir James M.

22.

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

23.

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

Brodsky, Joseph

24.

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

Pound, Ezra

25.

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

Twain, Mark

26.

No furniture is so charming as books.

Smith, Sydney

27.

Hypocrite reader -- my fellow -- my brother!

Baudelaire, Charles

28.

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

29.

Books are the bees which carry the quickening pollen from one to another mind.

Lowell, James Russell

30.

A novel is a mirror carried along a main road.

Stendhal, Henri B.

31.

Reading the Scriptures is an uplifting experience.

32.

Here, my dear Lucy, hide these books. Quick, quick! Fling Peregrine Pickle under the toilette --throw Roderick Random into the closet --put The Innocent Adultery into The Whole Duty of Man; thrust Lord Aimworth under the sofa! cram Ovid behind the bolster; there --put The Man of Feeling into your pocket. Now for them.

Sheridan, Richard Brinsley

33.

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

34.

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

35.

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

Joubert, Joseph

36.

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

Byron, Lord

37.

Next to acquiring good friends, the best acquisition is that of good books.

Colton, Charles Caleb

38.

A real book is not one that we read, but one that reads us.

Auden, W. H.

39.

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

40.

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.

41.

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

Belloc, Hilaire

42.

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

Shaw, George Bernard

43.

This is not a book. This is libel, slander, defamation of character. This is not a book, in the ordinary sense of the word. No, this is a prolonged insult, a gob of spit in the face of Art, a kick in the pants to God, Man, Destiny, Time, Love, Beauty... what you will. I am going to sing for you, a little off key perhaps, but I will sing.

Miller, Henry

44.

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

Whitman, Walt

45.

You've really got to start hitting the books because it's no joke out here.

Lee, Spike

46.

A book that is shut is but a block.

Fuller, Thomas

47.

The books that everybody admires are those that nobody reads.

France, Anatole

48.

Until it is kindled by a spirit as flamingly alive as the one which gave it birth a book is dead to us. Words divested of their magic are but dead hieroglyphs.

Miller, Henry

49.

Beware you be not swallowed up in books! An ounce of love is worth a pound of knowledge.

Wesley, John

50.

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

Dane, Frank