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

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

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.

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

When I get a little money, I buy books; and if any is left I buy food and clothes.

Erasmus, Desiderius

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

To read too many books is harmful.

Zedong, Mao

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

Holmes, Oliver Wendell

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

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

10.

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

11.

Books are the bees which carry the quickening pollen from one to another mind.

Lowell, James Russell

12.

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

13.

Thank you for sending me a copy of your book -- I'll waste no time reading it.

Hadas, Moses

14.

Books are the blessed chloroform of the mind.

Chambers, Robert

15.

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

16.

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

Critchfield, Jim

17.

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

18.

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

19.

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

20.

Reading is equivalent to thinking with someone else's head instead of with one's own.

Schopenhauer, Arthur

21.

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

Butler, Samuel

22.

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

Hope, Anthony

23.

A book that is shut is but a block.

Fuller, Thomas

24.

Readers are plentiful: thinkers are rare.

Martineau, Harriet

25.

Books are those faithful mirrors that reflect to our mind the minds of sages and heroes.

Gibbon, Edward

26.

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.

27.

Who ever converses among old books will be hard to please among the new.

Temple, Sir William

28.

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

29.

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

30.

Who kills a man kills a reasonable creature, God's image, but thee who destroys a good book, kills reason itself.

Milton, John

31.

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

Phillips, Wendell

32.

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.

33.

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.

34.

Books had instant replay long before televised sports.

Williams, Bert

35.

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

Mansfield, Katherine

36.

You will find most books worth reading are worth reading twice.

Morely, John

37.

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

38.

A wicked book cannot repent.

Proverb

39.

A book worth reading is worth buying.

Ruskin, John

40.

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

41.

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

42.

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

Ruskin, John

43.

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

44.

Reading a book is like re-writing it for yourself. You bring to a novel, anything you read, all your experience of the world. You bring your history and you read it in your own terms.

Carter, Angela

45.

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

Brodsky, Joseph

46.

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

Lawrence, D. H.

47.

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

48.

What is the most precious, the most exciting smell awaiting you in the house when you return to it after a dozen years or so? The smell of roses, you think? No, moldering books.

Sinyavsky, Andre

49.

Next, in importance to books are their titles.

Davies, Paul

50.

A great book should leave you with many experiences and slightly exhausted at the end. You should live several lives while reading it.

Styron, William