Motivational Quotes

Books - reading

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

Best Quotes about Books - reading

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

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

When you have mastered numbers, you will in fact no longer be reading numbers, any more than you read words when reading books You will be reading meanings.

Geneen, Harold S.

A book that is shut is but a block.

Fuller, Thomas

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

Secondat, Charles de

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

Belloc, Hilaire

Begin to read a book that will help you move toward your dream.

Brown, Les

A good book is the very essence of a good man. His virtues survive in it, while the foibles and faults of his actual life are forgotten. All the goodly company of the excellent and great sit around my table, or look down on me from yonder shelves, waiting patiently to answer my questions and enrich me with their wisdom. A precious book is a foretaste of immortality.

Cuyler, Theodore L.

A novel points out that the world consists entirely of exceptions.

Carey, Joyce

10.

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

Gibbon, Edward

11.

Nine-tenths of the existing books are nonsense and the clever books are the refutation of that nonsense.

Disraeli, Benjamin

12.

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

Carlyle, Thomas

13.

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

Butler, Samuel

14.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

15.

Fiction reveals truth that reality obscures.

West, Jessamyn

16.

Books and marriage go ill together.

Moliere

17.

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

Pound, Ezra

18.

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

Ruskin, John

19.

How can you dare teach a man to read until you've taught him everything else first?

Shaw, George Bernard

20.

We should be as careful of the books we read, as of the company we keep. The dead very often have more power than the living.

Edwards, Tryon

21.

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

Mansfield, Katherine

22.

The world of books is the most remarkable creation of man nothing else that he builds ever lasts monuments fall; nations perish; civilization grow old and die out; new races build others. But in the world of books are volumes that have seen this happen again and again and yet live on. Still young, still as fresh as the day they were written, still telling men's hearts, of the hearts of men centuries dead.

Day, Clarence

23.

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.

24.

My books are water; those of the great geniuses are wine -- everybody drinks water.

Twain, Mark

25.

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

Lytton, Lord Edward

26.

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

Lichtenberg, Georg C.

27.

If I had my way books would not be written in English, but in an exceedingly difficult secret language that only skilled professional readers and story-tellers could interpret. Then people like you would have to go to public halls and pay good prices to hear the professionals decode and read the books aloud for you. This plan would have the advantage of scaring off all amateur authors, retired politicians, country doctors and I-Married-a-Midget writers who would not have the patience to learn the secret language.

Davies, Robertson

28.

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

29.

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

30.

I am a part of everything that I have read.

Kieran, John

31.

The printing press is either the greatest blessing or the greatest curse of modern times, sometimes one forgets which it is.

Barrie, Sir James M.

32.

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

33.

There is no robber worse than a bad book.

Proverb, Italian

34.

No one can read with profit that which he cannot learn to read with pleasure.

Porter, Noah

35.

The books that everybody admires are those that nobody reads.

France, Anatole

36.

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

37.

Until it is kindled by a spirit as flamingly alive as the one which gave it birth a book is dead to us. Words divested of their magic are but dead hieroglyphs.

Miller, Henry

38.

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.

39.

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

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.

The failure to read good books both enfeebles the vision and strengthens our most fatal tendency --the belief that the here and now is all there is.

Bloom, Allan

42.

The things I want to know are in books; my best friend is the man who'll get me a book I ain't read.

Lincoln, Abraham

43.

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

Mcluhan, Marshall

44.

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

Rochman, Hazel

45.

The novel can't compete with cars, the movies, television, and liquor. A guy who's had a good feed and tanked up on good wine gives his old lady a kiss after supper and his day is over. Finished.

Celine, Louis-Ferdinand

46.

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

Jackson, Holbrook

47.

The book salesman should be honored because he brings to our attention, as a rule, the very books we need most and neglect most.

Crane, Frank

48.

Hypocrite reader -- my fellow -- my brother!

Baudelaire, Charles

49.

Read good, big important things.