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

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

The constant habit of perusing devout books is so indispensable, that it has been termed the oil of the lamp of prayer. Too much reading, however, and too little meditation, may produce the effect of a lamp inverted; which is extinguished by the very excess of that ailment, whose property is to feed it.

More, Hannah

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

Carey, Joyce

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

Colton, Charles Caleb

Books that you carry to the fire, and hold readily in your hand, are most useful after all.

Johnson, Samuel

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

Twain, Mark

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

Who kills a man kills a reasonable creature, God's image, but thee who destroys a good book, kills reason itself.

Milton, John

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

Erasmus, Desiderius

10.

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

Hugo, Victor

11.

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

Whitman, Walt

12.

All my good reading, you might say, was done in the toilet. There are passages in Ulysses which can be read only in the toilet -- if one wants to extract the full flavor of their content.

Miller, Henry

13.

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

14.

I always begin at the left with the opening word of the sentence and read toward the right and I recommend this method.

Thurber, James

15.

The tools I need for my work are paper, tobacco, food, and a little whiskey.

Faulkner, William

16.

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

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.

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

Lytton, Lord Edward

19.

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

Bulwer-Lytton, Edward G.

20.

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

21.

What gunpowder did for war the printing press has done for the mind.

Phillips, Wendell

22.

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

23.

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

24.

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.

25.

The classics are only primitive literature. They belong to the same class as primitive machinery and primitive music and primitive medicine.

Leacock, Stephen B.

26.

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

Chamfort, Sebastien-Roch Nicolas De

27.

The mere brute pleasure of reading --the sort of pleasure a cow must have in grazing.

Chesterton, Gilbert K.

28.

A big leather-bound volume makes an ideal razor strap. A thin book is useful to stick under a table with a broken caster to steady it. A large, flat atlas can be used to cover a window with a broken pane. And a thick, old-fashioned heavy book with a clasp is the finest thing in the world to throw at a noisy cat.

Twain, Mark

29.

Books are men of higher stature; the only men that speak aloud for future times to hear.

Barrett, E.S.

30.

Very young children eat their books, literally devouring their contents. This is one reason for the scarcity of first editions of Alice in Wonderland and other favorites of the nursery.

Rosenbach, A. S. W.

31.

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

32.

Books and marriage go ill together.

Moliere

33.

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.

34.

Prerequisite for rereadability in books: that they be forgettable.

Rostand, Jean

35.

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

Spielberg, Steven

36.

This book is not to be tossed lightly aside, but to be hurled with great force.

Parker, Dorothy

37.

The reason that fiction is more interesting than any other form of literature, to those who really like to study people, is that in fiction the author can really tell the truth without humiliating himself.

Roosevelt, Eleanor

38.

A book that is shut is but a block.

Fuller, Thomas

39.

There is creative reading as well as creative writing.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

40.

Reading the Scriptures is an uplifting experience.

41.

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

42.

In any situation, ask yourself: What strengths do I possess that can contribute towards accomplishing something in this situation? Then follow through.

43.

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

44.

A good book is the best of friends, the same today and for ever.

Tupper, Martin

45.

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

Carlyle, Thomas

46.

Book love... is your pass to the greatest, the purest, and the most perfect pleasure that God has prepared for His creatures.

Trollope, Anthony

47.

The age of the book is almost gone.

Steiner, George

48.

Any book that helps a child to form a habit of reading, to make reading one of his deep and continuing needs, is good for him.

McKenna, Richard

49.

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

50.

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

Morely, John