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

It is books that teach us to refine our pleasures when young, and to recall them with satisfaction when we are old.

Hunt, Leigh

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

Books are not men and yet they stay alive.

Benet, Stephen Vincent

I feel like I'm drowning. Every night, I'm carrying home loads of things to read but I'm too exhausted. I keep clipping things and Xeroxing them and planning to read them eventually, but I just end up throwing it all away and feeling guilty.

Levine, Ghita

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

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

Brookner, Anita

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

Read good, big important things.

Noonan, Peggy

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

Byron, Lord

10.

There is no robber worse than a bad book.

Proverb, Italian

11.

The multitude of books is a great evil. There is no limit to this fever for writing.

Luther, Martin

12.

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

13.

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

14.

Many books require no thought from those who read them, and for a very simple reason: they made no such demand upon those who wrote them. Those works, therefore, are the most valuable, that set our thinking faculties in the fullest operation. understand them.

Clarendon

15.

Some books leave us free and some books make us free.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

16.

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

Dawkins, John

17.

He has only half learned the art of reading who has not added to it the more refined art of skipping and skimming.

Balfour, Arthur James

18.

Books are not absolutely dead things, but do contain a certain potency of life in them, to be as active as the soul whose progeny they are; they preserve, as in a vial, the purest efficacy and extraction of the living intellect that bred them.

Milton, John

19.

Reading is a basic tool in the living of a good life.

Adler, Mortimer J.

20.

Books are divided into two classes, the books of the hour and the books of all time.

Ruskin, John

21.

A book worth reading is worth buying.

Ruskin, John

22.

A man ought to read just as his inclination leads him; for what he reads as a task will do him little good.

Johnson, Samuel

23.

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

Hugo, Victor

24.

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

Belloc, Hilaire

25.

As writers become more numerous, it is natural for readers to become more indolent; whence must necessarily arise a desire of attaining knowledge with the greatest possible ease.

Goldsmith, Oliver

26.

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

27.

Without books the development of civilization would have been impossible. They are the engines of change, windows on the world, Lighthouses as the poet said erected in the sea of time. They are companions, teachers, magicians, bankers of the treasures of the mind, Books are humanity in print.

Schopenhauer, Arthur

28.

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

Rohn, Jim

29.

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

Pascal, Blaise

30.

Footnotes are the finer-suckered surfaces that allow testicular paragraphs to hold fast to the wider reality of the library.

Baker, Nicholson

31.

To read too many books is harmful.

Zedong, Mao

32.

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

33.

My early and invincible love of reading I would not exchange for all the riches of India.

Gibbon, Edward

34.

A book may be compared to your neighbor: if it be good, it cannot last too long; if bad, you cannot get rid of it too early.

Brooke, Rupert

35.

A library is thought in cold storage.

Samuel, Herbert

36.

I am what libraries and librarians have made me, with little assistance from a professor of Greek and poets.

Sandwell, B. K.

37.

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

Mansfield, Katherine

38.

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

Pound, Ezra

39.

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

40.

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

41.

Hypocrite reader -- my fellow -- my brother!

Baudelaire, Charles

42.

What is reading, but silent conversation.

Landor, Walter Savage

43.

A bad book is the worse that it cannot repent. It has not been the devil's policy to keep the masses of mankind in ignorance; but finding that they will read, he is doing all in his power to poison their books.

Kirk, E.N.

44.

The newest books are those that never grow old.

Jackson, George Holbrook

45.

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

Camus, Albert

46.

Thank you for sending me a copy of your book -- I'll waste no time reading it.

Hadas, Moses

47.

Some of the most famous books are the least worth reading. Their fame was due to their having done something that needed to be doing in their day. The work is done and the virtue of the book has expired.

Morely, John

48.

Beware of the person of one book.

Aquinas, St. Thomas

49.

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

Milton, John

50.

I read the newspaper avidly. It is my one form of continuous fiction.

Bevan, Aneurin