Motivational Quotes

Books - reading

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

Best Quotes about Books - reading

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

Read as you taste fruit or savor wine, or enjoy friendship, love or life.

Jackson, Holbrook

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

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

Schopenhauer, Arthur

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

People are much more willing to lend you books than bookcases.

Twain, Mark

Books are lighthouses erected in the great sea of time.

Whipple, Edwin P.

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

'Tis the good reader that makes the good book; in every book he finds passages which seem to be confidences or sides hidden from all else and unmistakably meant for his ear; the profit of books is according to the sensibility of the reader; the profound thought or passion sleeps as in a mine, until it is discovered by an equal mind and heart.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

10.

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

Carlyle, Thomas

11.

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

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.

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

14.

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

15.

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.

16.

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.

17.

God be thanked for books; they are the voices of the distant and the dead, and make us heirs of the spiritual life of past ages.

Channing, William Ellery

18.

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

19.

I've never know any trouble than an hour's reading didn't assuage.

Secondat, Charles de

20.

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

Bevan, Aneurin

21.

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

22.

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

23.

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

24.

Thy books should, like thy friends, not many be, yet such wherein men may thy judgment see.

Wycherley, William

25.

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

26.

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.

27.

You should read books like you take medicine, by advice, and not by advertisement.

Ruskin, John

28.

Books had instant replay long before televised sports.

Williams, Bert

29.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

30.

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

31.

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

32.

One half who graduate from college never read another book.

True, Herbert

33.

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

34.

No man understands a deep book until he has seen and lived at least part of its contents.

Pound, Ezra

35.

Reading is to the mind what exercise is to the body. It is wholesome and bracing for the mind to have its faculties kept on the stretch.

Steele, Sir Richard

36.

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

37.

A library is thought in cold storage.

Samuel, Herbert

38.

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

39.

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

Whitman, Walt

40.

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

41.

Five daily newspapers arrive in my California driveway. The New York times and the Wall Street Journal are supplemented by three local papers. As for magazines, I read, or at least skim, Business Week, Forbes, The Economist, INC; Industry Week, Fortune. Other subscriptions include Sales and Marketing Management, Modern Health Care, Progressive Grocer, High Tech Business, and Slaon Management Review from MIT. I religiously read Business Tokyo, Asia Week, and Far Eastern Economic Review. I glance at Newsweek and Time ... but I devour the New Republic, Policy Review, Foreign Affairs, The Washington Monthly, and Public Interest. How about books? A dozen or more each month.

Peters, Thomas J.

42.

Beware of the person of one book.

Aquinas, St. Thomas

43.

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

Mansfield, Katherine

44.

No furniture is so charming as books.

Smith, Sydney

45.

A dose of poison can do its work but once. A bad book can go on poisoning minds for generations.

Murray, William

46.

All the known world, excepting only savage nations, is governed by books.

Voltaire

47.

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

Baker, Nicholson

48.

Tradition is but a meteor, which, if it once falls, cannot be rekindled. Memory, once interrupted, is not to be recalled. But written learning is a fixed luminary, which, after the cloud that had hidden it has passed away, is again bright in its proper station. So books are faithful repositories, which may be awhile neglected or forgotten, but when opened again, will again impart instruction.

Johnson

49.

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

50.

The chief knowledge that a man gets from reading books is the knowledge that very few of them are worth reading.

Mencken, H. L.