Motivational Quotes

Books - reading

She could give herself up to the written word as naturally as a good dancer to music or a fine swimmer to water. The only difficulty was that after finishing the last sentence she was left with a feeling at once hollow and uncomfortably full. Exactly like indigestion.

- Rhys, Jean

Best Quotes about Books - reading

Books are lighthouses erected in the great sea of time.

Whipple, Edwin P.

Every abridgement of a good book is a fool abridged.

Montaigne, Michel Eyquem De

The power of a text is different when it is read from when it is copied out. Only the copied text thus commands the soul of him who is occupied with it, whereas the mere reader never discovers the new aspects of his inner self that are opened by the text, that road cut through the interior jungle forever closing behind it: because the reader follows the movement of his mind in the free flight of day-dreaming, whereas the copier submits it to command.

Benjamin, Walter

There is creative reading as well as creative writing.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

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

Erasmus, Desiderius

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

Those who do not read are no better off than those who cannot read.

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

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

10.

No story is the same to us after a lapse of time; or rather we who read it are no longer the same interpreters.

Eliot, George

11.

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

12.

An empty book is like an infant's soul, in which anything may be written. It is capable of all things, but containeth nothing. I have a mind to fill this with profitable wonders.

Traherne, Thomas

13.

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

Maclennan, Hugh

14.

Books are but waste paper unless we spend in action the wisdom we get from thought -- asleep. When we are weary of the living, we may repair to the dead, who have nothing of peevishness, pride, or design in their conversation.

Collier, Jeremy

15.

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

Hugo, Victor

16.

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

17.

Books are not men and yet they stay alive.

Benet, Stephen Vincent

18.

One half who graduate from college never read another book.

True, Herbert

19.

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

Rohn, Jim

20.

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

21.

A vacuum of ideas affects people differently than a vacuum of air, otherwise readers of books would be constantly collapsing.

Lichtenberg, Georg C.

22.

Everything in this book may be wrong. [The Savior's Manual]

Bach, Richard

23.

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

Whitman, Walt

24.

A great book should leave you with many experiences and slightly exhausted at the end. You should live several lives while reading it.

Styron, William

25.

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

Colton, Charles Caleb

26.

A person who publishes a book appears willfully in public with his pants down.

Millay, Edna St. Vincent

27.

Old books, you know well, are books of the world's youth, and new books are the fruits of its age.

Holmes, Oliver Wendell

28.

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

29.

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

Carey, Joyce

30.

The best effect of any book, is that it excites the reader to self-activity.

Carlyle, Thomas

31.

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

32.

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

33.

What we become depends on what we read after all the professors have finished with us. The greatest university of all is the collection of books.

Carlyle, Thomas

34.

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

35.

If a book comes from the heart it will contrive to reach other hearts. All art and author craft are of small account to that.

Carlyle, Thomas

36.

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

Wesley, John

37.

The age of the book is almost gone.

Steiner, George

38.

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

39.

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

40.

A book worth reading is worth buying.

Ruskin, John

41.

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

Brookner, Anita

42.

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

43.

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

Byron, Lord

44.

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

Shaw, George Bernard

45.

The pleasure of reading is doubled when one lives with another who shares the same books.

Mansfield, Katherine

46.

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

47.

I would sooner read a timetable or a catalog than nothing at all.

Maugham, W. Somerset

48.

To use books rightly, is to go to them for help; to appeal to them when our own knowledge and power fail; to be led by them into wider sight and purer conception than our own, and to receive from them the united sentence of the judges and councils of all time, against our solitary and unstable opinions.

Ruskin, John

49.

Except a living man there is nothing more wonderful than a book! a message to us from the dead -- from human souls we never saw, who lived, perhaps, thousands of miles away. And yet these, in those little sheets of paper, speak to us, arouse us, terrify us, teach us, comfort us, open their hearts to us as brothers.

Kingsley, Charles

50.

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