Motivational Quotes

Books - reading

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.

Best Quotes about Books - reading

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

Holmes, Oliver Wendell

Here, my dear Lucy, hide these books. Quick, quick! Fling Peregrine Pickle under the toilette --throw Roderick Random into the closet --put The Innocent Adultery into The Whole Duty of Man; thrust Lord Aimworth under the sofa! cram Ovid behind the bolster; there --put The Man of Feeling into your pocket. Now for them.

Sheridan, Richard Brinsley

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 succeed, and lives fail.

Browning, Elizabeth Barrett

No furniture is so charming as books.

Smith, Sydney

We are too civil to books. For a few golden sentences we will turn over and actually read a volume of four or five hundred pages.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

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.

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

Barrett, E.S.

Until I feared I would lose it, I never loved to read. One does not love breathing.

Lee, Harper

10.

Books are lighthouses erected in the great sea of time.

Whipple, Edwin P.

11.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

12.

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.

13.

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

Voltaire

14.

When you reread a classic, you do not see more in the book than you did before; you see more in you than there was before.

Fadiman, Clifton

15.

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

16.

You will be the same person in five as you are today except for the people you meet and the books you read.

Jones, Charles ''Tremendous''

17.

The only books that influence us are those for which we are ready, and which have gone a little farther down our particular path than we have yet got ourselves.

Forster, Edward M.

18.

Read good, big important things.

Noonan, Peggy

19.

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

Ruskin, John

20.

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

Descartes, Rene

21.

The mortality of all inanimate things is terrible to me, but that of books most of all.

Howells, William Dean

22.

He that loves a book will never want a faithful friend, a wholesome counselor, a cheerful companion, an effectual comforter. By study, by reading, by thinking, one may innocently divert and pleasantly entertain himself, as in all weathers, as in all fortunes.

Barrow

23.

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

Brodsky, Joseph

24.

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

Hunt, Leigh

25.

This is not a book. This is libel, slander, defamation of character. This is not a book, in the ordinary sense of the word. No, this is a prolonged insult, a gob of spit in the face of Art, a kick in the pants to God, Man, Destiny, Time, Love, Beauty... what you will. I am going to sing for you, a little off key perhaps, but I will sing.

Miller, Henry

26.

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

27.

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

Hugo, Victor

28.

The world may be full of fourth-rate writers but it's also full of fourth-rate readers.

Barstow, Stan

29.

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

Lytton, Lord Edward

30.

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

Mansfield, Katherine

31.

When a book raises your spirit, and inspires you with noble and manly thoughts, seek for no other test of its excellence. It is good, and made by a good workman.

Bruyere, Jean De La

32.

A house is not a home unless it contains food and fire for the mind as well as the body.

Fuller, Margaret

33.

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

34.

A successful book cannot afford to be more than ten percent new.

Mcluhan, Marshall

35.

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

36.

Books are the blessed chloroform of the mind.

Chambers, Robert

37.

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

Luther, Martin

38.

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

Jackson, Holbrook

39.

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

40.

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

41.

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

42.

A novel must be exceptionally good to live as long as the average cat.

Maclennan, Hugh

43.

Reading the Scriptures is an uplifting experience.

44.

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.

45.

The oldest books are still only just out to those who have not read them.

Butler, Samuel

46.

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

Murray, William

47.

Beware of the person of one book.

Aquinas, St. Thomas

48.

The successful Accelerated Reader is able to read larger than normal blocks or bites of the printed page with each eye stop. He has accepted, without reservation, the philosophy that the most important benefit of reading is the gaining of information, ideas, mental picture and entertainment-not the fretting over words. He has come to the realization that words in and of themselves are for the most part insignificant.

Cutler, Wade E.

49.

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

Lichtenberg, Georg C.

50.

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