Motivational Quotes

Books - reading

There is no robber worse than a bad book.

- Proverb, Italian

Best Quotes about Books - reading

Thy books should, like thy friends, not many be, yet such wherein men may thy judgment see.

Wycherley, William

A house without books is like a room without windows. No man has a right to bring up his children without surrounding them with books, if he has the means to buy them. It is a wrong to his family. Children learn to read by being in the presence of books. The love of knowledge comes with reading and grows upon it. And the love of knowledge, in a young mind, is almost always a warrant against the inferior excitement of passions and vices.

Mann, Horace

From the moment I picked your book up until I laid it down I was convulsed with laughter. Some day I intend reading it.

Marx, Groucho

The most foolish kind of a book is a kind of leaky boat on the sea of wisdom; some of the wisdom will get in anyhow.

Holmes, Oliver Wendell

In science, read by preference the newest works. In literature, read the oldest. The classics are always modern.

Lytton, Lord Edward

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

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

When we read a story, we inhabit it. The covers of the book are like a roof and four walls. What is to happen next will take place within the four walls of the story. And this is possible because the story's voice makes everything its own.

Berger, John

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

Fuller, Margaret

10.

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

11.

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

Hugo, Victor

12.

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

Bulwer-Lytton, Edward G.

13.

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

14.

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

Temple, Sir William

15.

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

Mencken, H. L.

16.

Books are lighthouses erected in the great sea of time.

Whipple, Edwin P.

17.

No entertainment is so cheap as reading, nor is any pleasure so lasting.

Montagu, Lady Mary Wortley

18.

Books had instant replay long before televised sports.

Williams, Bert

19.

The real risks for any artist are taken in pushing the work to the limits of what is possible, in the attempt to increase the sum of what it is possible to think. Books become good when they go to this edge and risk falling over it --when they endanger the artist by reason of what he has, or has not, artistically dared.

Rushdie, Salman

20.

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

21.

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.

22.

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.

23.

I am not a speed reader. I am a speed understander.

Asimov, Isaac

24.

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.

25.

A novel is a mirror carried along a main road.

Stendhal, Henri B.

26.

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

Lichtenberg, Georg C.

27.

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

Brookner, Anita

28.

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.

29.

'Tis the good reader that makes the good book; in every book he finds passages which seem to be confidences or sides hidden from all else and unmistakably meant for his ear; the profit of books is according to the sensibility of the reader; the profound thought or passion sleeps as in a mine, until it is discovered by an equal mind and heart.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

30.

Most books today seemed to have been written overnight from books read the day before.

Chamfort, Sebastien-Roch Nicolas De

31.

Reading makes immigrants of us all. It takes us away from home, but more important, it finds homes for us everywhere.

Rochman, Hazel

32.

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

Lee, Spike

33.

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

34.

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

Mccay, James T.

35.

Books are not men and yet they stay alive.

Benet, Stephen Vincent

36.

There is no robber worse than a bad book.

Proverb, Italian

37.

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

Porter, Noah

38.

There are books so alive that you're always afraid that while you weren't reading, the book has gone and changed, has shifted like a river; while you went on living, it went on living too, and like a river moved on and moved away. No one has stepped twice into the same river. But did anyone ever step twice into the same book?

Tsvetaeva, Marina

39.

You will find most books worth reading are worth reading twice.

Morely, John

40.

The unread story is not a story; it is little black marks on wood pulp. The reader, reading it, makes it live: a live thing, a story.

Guin, Ursula K. Le

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.

When you have mastered numbers, you will in fact no longer be reading numbers, any more than you read words when reading books You will be reading meanings.

Geneen, Harold S.

43.

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

44.

One half who graduate from college never read another book.

True, Herbert

45.

To read too many books is harmful.

Zedong, Mao

46.

Nine-tenths of the existing books are nonsense and the clever books are the refutation of that nonsense.

Disraeli, Benjamin

47.

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

48.

Reading the Scriptures is an uplifting experience.

49.

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

50.

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