Motivational Quotes

Books - reading

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

- Ruskin, John

Best Quotes about Books - reading

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

No matter how busy you may think you are, you must find time for reading, or surrender yourself to self-chosen ignorance.

Townsend, Atwood H.

Everything in this book may be wrong. [The Savior's Manual]

Bach, Richard

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

Most books today seemed to have been written overnight from books read the day before.

Chamfort, Sebastien-Roch Nicolas De

I heard his library burned down and both books were destroyed -- and one of them hadn't even been colored in yet.

Dawkins, John

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

Sandwell, B. K.

To learn to read is to light a fire; every syllable that is spelled out is a spark.

Hugo, Victor

A novel is a mirror carried along a main road.

Stendhal, Henri B.

10.

Don't ask me who's influenced me. A lion is made up of the lambs he's digested, and I've been reading all my life.

Seferis, Giorgos

11.

To feel most beautifully alive means to be reading something beautiful, ready always to apprehend in the flow of language the sudden flash of poetry.

Bachelard, Gaston

12.

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

Voltaire

13.

Everything you need for better future and success has already been written. And guess what? All you have to do is go to the library.

Rohn, Jim

14.

Learning to read has been reduced to a process of mastering a series of narrow, specific, hierarchical skills. Where armed-forces recruits learn the components of a rifle or the intricacies of close order drill by the numbers, recruits to reading learn its mechanics sound by sound and word by word.

Gross, Jacquelyn

15.

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

16.

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

Lee, Harper

17.

A conventional good read is usually a bad read, a relaxing bath in what we know already. A true good read is surely an act of innovative creation in which we, the readers, become conspirators.

Bradbury, Malcolm

18.

Readers are plentiful: thinkers are rare.

Martineau, Harriet

19.

What is reading, but silent conversation.

Landor, Walter Savage

20.

One sheds one's sicknesses in books -- repeats and presents again one's emotions, to be master of them.

Lawrence, D. H.

21.

Of all the ways of acquiring books, writing them oneself is regarded as the most praiseworthy method. Writers are really people who write books not because they are poor, but because they are dissatisfied with the books which they could buy but do not like.

Benjamin, Walter

22.

Early in the morning, at break of day, in all the freshness and dawn of one's strength, to read a book --I call that vicious!

Nietzsche, Friedrich

23.

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

24.

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

25.

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

Adler, Mortimer J.

26.

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

Hugo, Victor

27.

Happy is he who has laid up in his youth, and held fast in all fortune, a genuine and passionate love for reading.

Choate, Rufus

28.

There are two kinds of books. Those that no one reads and those that no one ought to read.

Mencken, H. L.

29.

From the moment I picked your book up until I laid it down I was convulsed with laughter. Some day I intend reading it.

Marx, Groucho

30.

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

Holmes, Oliver Wendell

31.

I am a part of everything that I have read.

Kieran, John

32.

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

33.

I always like to look on the optimistic side of life, but I am realistic enough to know that life is a complex matter.

Disney, Walt

34.

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

Phillips, Wendell

35.

Americans will listen, but they do not care to read. War and Peace must wait for the leisure of retirement, which never really comes: meanwhile it helps to furnish the living room. Blockbusting fiction is bought as furniture. Unread, it maintains its value. Read, it looks like money wasted. Cunningly, Americans know that books contain a person, and they want the person, not the book.

Burgess, Anthony

36.

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

Baker, Nicholson

37.

Read nothing that you do not care to remember, and remember nothing you do not mean to use.

Blackie, Professor

38.

Read good, big important things.

Noonan, Peggy

39.

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''

40.

Fiction reveals truth that reality obscures.

West, Jessamyn

41.

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

42.

The mere brute pleasure of reading --the sort of pleasure a cow must have in grazing.

Chesterton, Gilbert K.

43.

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

Faulkner, William

44.

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

Pound, Ezra

45.

There was a time when the world acted on books; now books act on the world.

Joubert, Joseph

46.

You can either read something many times in order to be assured that you got it all, or else you can define your purpose and use techniques which will assure that you have met it and gotten what you need.

Kump, Peter

47.

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

48.

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

Ruskin, John

49.

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

50.

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