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

Beware of the person of one book.

Aquinas, St. Thomas

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.

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

Sandwell, B. K.

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

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

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

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

Wesley, John

Digressions, incontestably, are the sunshine; they are the life, the soul of reading! Take them out of this book, for instance, --you might as well take the book along with them; --one cold external winter would reign in every page of it; restore them to the writer; --he steps forth like a bridegroom, --bids All-hail; brings in variety, and forbids the appetite to fail.

Sterne, Laurence

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

Belloc, Hilaire

10.

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

Montagu, Lady Mary Wortley

11.

Today a reader, tomorrow a leader.

Fusselman, W.

12.

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

Chappell, Warren

13.

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

14.

In the dark colony of night, when I consider man's magnificent capacity for malice, madness, folly, envy, rage, and destructiveness, and I wonder whether we shall not end up as breakfast for newts and polyps, I seem to hear the muffled cries of all the words in all the books with covers closed.

Rosten, Leo

15.

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

Brookner, Anita

16.

A real book is not one that we read, but one that reads us.

Auden, W. H.

17.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

18.

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

19.

There is creative reading as well as creative writing.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

20.

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

Camus, Albert

21.

There are worse crimes than burning books. One of them is not reading them.

Brodsky, Joseph

22.

There are people who read too much: bibliobibuli. I know some who are constantly drunk on books, as other men are drunk on whiskey or religion. They wander through this most diverting and stimulating of worlds in a haze, seeing nothing and hearing nothing.

Mencken, H. L.

23.

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

Barrett, E.S.

24.

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

25.

I wish I could write a beautiful book to break those hearts that are soon to cease to exist: a book of faith and small neat worlds and of people who live by the philosophies of popular songs.

26.

If a secret history of books could be written, and the author's private thoughts and meanings noted down alongside of his story, how many insipid volumes would become interesting, and dull tales excite the reader!

Thackeray, William M.

27.

Fiction reveals truth that reality obscures.

West, Jessamyn

28.

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

Millay, Edna St. Vincent

29.

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.

30.

To read too many books is harmful.

Zedong, Mao

31.

Rhys, Jean

32.

To buy books would be a good thing if we also could buy the time to read them.

Schopenhauer, Arthur

33.

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

34.

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.

35.

You are wise, witty and wonderful, but you spend too much time reading this sort of stuff.

Critchfield, Jim

36.

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

37.

A book worth reading is worth buying.

Ruskin, John

38.

Next, in importance to books are their titles.

Davies, Paul

39.

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

Spielberg, Steven

40.

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

41.

One always tends to overpraise a long book, because one has got through it.

Forster, Edward M.

42.

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

Hadas, Moses

43.

A multitude of books distracts the mind.

Socrates

44.

The greatest gift is the passion for reading. It is cheap, it consoles, it distracts, it excites, it gives you knowledge of the world and experience of a wide kind. It is a moral illumination.

Hardwick, Elizabeth

45.

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

Adler, Mortimer J.

46.

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

47.

Books and marriage go ill together.

Moliere

48.

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

Johnson, Samuel

49.

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

50.

The reading of all good books is like a conversation with all the finest men of past centuries.