Motivational Quotes

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

Best Quotes about Books - reading

You've really got to start hitting the books because it's no joke out here.

Lee, Spike

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

Ideally a book would have no order to it, and the reader would have to discover his own.

Vaneigem, Raoul

Miss a meal if you have to, but don't miss a book.

Rohn, Jim

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

Erasmus, Desiderius

I feel like I'm drowning. Every night, I'm carrying home loads of things to read but I'm too exhausted. I keep clipping things and Xeroxing them and planning to read them eventually, but I just end up throwing it all away and feeling guilty.

Levine, Ghita

There is no robber worse than a bad book.

Proverb, Italian

Everywhere I have sought rest and not found it, except sitting in a corner by myself with a little book.

Kempis, Thomas

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

Schopenhauer, Arthur

10.

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

Chamfort, Sebastien-Roch Nicolas De

11.

Read good, big important things.

Noonan, Peggy

12.

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

Schopenhauer, Arthur

13.

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

Mansfield, Katherine

14.

Except a living man there is nothing more wonderful than a book! a message to us from the dead -- from human souls we never saw, who lived, perhaps, thousands of miles away. And yet these, in those little sheets of paper, speak to us, arouse us, terrify us, teach us, comfort us, open their hearts to us as brothers.

Kingsley, Charles

15.

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

16.

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

Gibbon, Edward

17.

The books that everybody admires are those that nobody reads.

France, Anatole

18.

Read, read, read. Read everything-- trash, classics, good and bad, and see how they do it. Just like a carpenter who works as an apprentice and studies the master. Read! You'll absorb it. Then write. If it is good, you'll find out. If it's not, throw it out the window.

Faulkner, William

19.

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

20.

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

21.

Books succeed, and lives fail.

Browning, Elizabeth Barrett

22.

Books are lighthouses erected in the great sea of time.

Whipple, Edwin P.

23.

Don't just read the easy stuff. You may be entertained by it, but you will never grow from it.

Rohn, Jim

24.

A book is like a man -- clever and dull, brave and cowardly, beautiful and ugly. For every flowering thought there will be a page like a wet and mangy mongrel, and for every looping flight a tap on the wing and a reminder that wax cannot hold the feathers firm too near the sun.

Steinbeck, John

25.

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

Brodsky, Joseph

26.

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

Belloc, Hilaire

27.

Without books the development of civilization would have been impossible. They are the engines of change, windows on the world, Lighthouses as the poet said erected in the sea of time. They are companions, teachers, magicians, bankers of the treasures of the mind, Books are humanity in print.

Schopenhauer, Arthur

28.

Does there, I wonder, exist a being who has read all, or approximately all, that the person of average culture is supposed to have read, and that not to have read is a social sin? If such a being does exist, surely he is an old, a very old man.

Bennett, Arnold

29.

The reading or non-reading a book will never keep down a single petticoat.

Byron, Lord

30.

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

Forster, Edward M.

31.

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.

32.

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

Carey, Joyce

33.

No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader.

Frost, Robert

34.

Books in a large university library system: 2, 000,000. Books in an average large city library: 1 0,000. Average number of books in a chain bookstore: 30, 000. Books in an average neighborhood branch library: 20, 000.

Horowitz, Lois

35.

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

36.

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

Lytton, Lord Edward

37.

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

Lee, Harper

38.

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

Carlyle, Thomas

39.

A book that is shut is but a block.

Fuller, Thomas

40.

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

41.

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

Porter, Noah

42.

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

Mcluhan, Marshall

43.

What is important is not to be able to read rapidly, but to be able to decide what not to read.

Mccay, James T.

44.

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

45.

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

46.

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

Gibbon, Edward

47.

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

48.

The worst readers are those who behave like plundering troops: they take away a few things they can use, dirty and confound the remainder, and revile the whole.

Nietzsche, Friedrich

49.

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

Voltaire

50.

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