Motivational Quotes

Books - reading

A wicked book cannot repent.

- Proverb

Best Quotes about Books - reading

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

Dawkins, John

A book that is shut is but a block.

Fuller, Thomas

Read Homer once, and you can read no more. For all books else appear so mean, and so poor. Verse will seem prose; but still persist to read, and Homer will be all the books you need.

Buckingham, Duke of

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

Jackson, Holbrook

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

Of all the ways of acquiring books, writing them oneself is regarded as the most praiseworthy method. Writers are really people who write books not because they are poor, but because they are dissatisfied with the books which they could buy but do not like.

Benjamin, Walter

There is a set of religious, or rather moral, writings which teach that virtue is the certain road to happiness, and vice to misery in this world. A very wholesome and comfortable doctrine, and to which we have but one objection, namely, that it is not true.

Fielding, Henry

Once we have learned to read, meaning of words can somehow register without consciousness.

Marcel, Anthony

Books and marriage go ill together.

Moliere

10.

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

Shaw, George Bernard

11.

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

Brookner, Anita

12.

Fiction reveals truth that reality obscures.

West, Jessamyn

13.

Only a generation of readers will span a generation of writers.

Spielberg, Steven

14.

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

Schopenhauer, Arthur

15.

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

16.

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

17.

All the best stories in the world are but one story in reality -- the story of escape. It is the only thing which interests us all and at all times, how to escape.

Benson, Arthur Christopher

18.

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.

19.

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

Vaneigem, Raoul

20.

The last thing one discovers in composing a work is what to put first.

Pascal, Blaise

21.

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

22.

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.

23.

What is reading, but silent conversation.

Landor, Walter Savage

24.

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

25.

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

Carey, Joyce

26.

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

Camus, Albert

27.

Books are the blessed chloroform of the mind.

Chambers, Robert

28.

Everything you need for better future and success has already been written. And guess what? All you have to do is go to the library.

Rohn, Jim

29.

The successful Accelerated Reader is able to read larger than normal blocks or bites of the printed page with each eye stop. He has accepted, without reservation, the philosophy that the most important benefit of reading is the gaining of information, ideas, mental picture and entertainment-not the fretting over words. He has come to the realization that words in and of themselves are for the most part insignificant.

Cutler, Wade E.

30.

A novel must be exceptionally good to live as long as the average cat.

Maclennan, Hugh

31.

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.

32.

The books one has written in the past have two surprises in store: one couldn't write them again, and wouldn't want to.

Rostand, Jean

33.

He had read much, if one considers his long life; but his contemplation was much more than his reading. He was wont to say that if he had read as much as other men he should have known no more than other men.

Aubrey, John

34.

Somewhere, everywhere, now hidden, now apparent in what ever is written down, is the form of a human being. If we seek to know him, are we idly occupied?

Woolf, Virginia

35.

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

36.

People are much more willing to lend you books than bookcases.

Twain, Mark

37.

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

Gibbon, Edward

38.

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

Voltaire

39.

Readers are less and less seen as mere non-writers, the subhuman other or flawed derivative of the author; the lack of a pen is no longer a shameful mark of secondary status but a positively enabling space, just as within every writer can be seen to lurk, as a repressed but contaminating antithesis, a reader.

Eagleton, Terry

40.

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

41.

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

Rohn, Jim

42.

A conventional good read is usually a bad read, a relaxing bath in what we know already. A true good read is surely an act of innovative creation in which we, the readers, become conspirators.

Bradbury, Malcolm

43.

Read good, big important things.

Noonan, Peggy

44.

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

45.

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

Chappell, Warren

46.

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

47.

Education... has produced a vast population able to read but unable to distinguish what is worth reading, an easy prey to sensations and cheap appeals.

Trevelyan, G. M.

48.

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.

49.

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

50.

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

Frost, Robert