Motivational Quotes

Books - reading

The book you don't read won't help.

- Rohn, Jim

Best Quotes about Books - reading

A good title is the title of a successful book.

Chandler, Raymond

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

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

Leacock, Stephen B.

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

The books we read should be chosen with great care, that they may be, as an Egyptian king wrote over his library, The medicines of the soul.

Hood, Paxton

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

Barrett, E.S.

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

Holmes, Oliver Wendell

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

10.

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

Phillips, Wendell

11.

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.

12.

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

Lichtenberg, Georg C.

13.

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

Faulkner, William

14.

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

15.

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

Pascal, Blaise

16.

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.

17.

The newest books are those that never grow old.

Jackson, George Holbrook

18.

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

19.

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

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.

A book might be written on the injustice of the just.

Hope, Anthony

22.

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

23.

Everything in the world exists to end up in a book.

Mallarme, Stephane

24.

Reading the Scriptures is an uplifting experience.

25.

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

26.

The books that everybody admires are those that nobody reads.

France, Anatole

27.

There is no robber worse than a bad book.

Proverb, Italian

28.

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

29.

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

Wesley, John

30.

Books are masters who instruct us without rods or ferules, without words or anger, without bread or money. If you approach them, they are not asleep; if you seek them, they do not hide; if you blunder, they do not scold; if you are ignorant, they do not laugh at you.

Bury, Richard De

31.

To read well, that is, to read true books in a true spirit, is a noble exercise, and one that will task the reader more than any other exercise which the customs of the day esteem. It requires a training such as the athletes underwent, the steady intention almost of the whole life to this object.

Thoreau, Henry David

32.

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

33.

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.

34.

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

Trollope, Anthony

35.

The great American novel has not only already been written, it has already been rejected.

Dane, Frank

36.

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

Rochman, Hazel

37.

I divide all readers into two classes: those who read to remember and those who read to forget.

Phelps, William Lyon

38.

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

Hugo, Victor

39.

A book is like a man -- clever and dull, brave and cowardly, beautiful and ugly. For every flowering thought there will be a page like a wet and mangy mongrel, and for every looping flight a tap on the wing and a reminder that wax cannot hold the feathers firm too near the sun.

Steinbeck, John

40.

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

Lichtenberg, Georg C.

41.

A book is a part of life, a manifestation of life, just as much as a tree or a horse or a star. It obeys its own rhythms, its own laws, whether it be a novel, a play, or a diary. The deep, hidden rhythm of life is always there -- that of the pulse, the heart beat.

Miller, Henry

42.

I know every book of mine by its smell, and I have but to put my nose between the pages to be reminded of all sorts of things.

Gissing, George Robert

43.

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

Bulwer-Lytton, Edward G.

44.

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

Maugham, W. Somerset

45.

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

Critchfield, Jim

46.

Books give not wisdom where none was before. But where some is, there reading makes it more.

Harington, John

47.

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

Mccay, James T.

48.

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

49.

No furniture is so charming as books.

Smith, Sydney

50.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo