Motivational Quotes

Books - reading

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

- Ruskin, John

Best Quotes about Books - reading

One half who graduate from college never read another book.

True, Herbert

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

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

Critchfield, Jim

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

Barstow, Stan

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

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

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

I read the newspaper avidly. It is my one form of continuous fiction.

Bevan, Aneurin

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

10.

The power of a text is different when it is read from when it is copied out. Only the copied text thus commands the soul of him who is occupied with it, whereas the mere reader never discovers the new aspects of his inner self that are opened by the text, that road cut through the interior jungle forever closing behind it: because the reader follows the movement of his mind in the free flight of day-dreaming, whereas the copier submits it to command.

Benjamin, Walter

11.

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

12.

What we become depends on what we read after all the professors have finished with us. The greatest university of all is the collection of books.

Carlyle, Thomas

13.

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

Mansfield, Katherine

14.

I don't think any good book is based on factual experience. Bad books are about things the writer already knew before he wrote them.

Fuentes, Carlos

15.

Books had instant replay long before televised sports.

Williams, Bert

16.

The words of my book nothing, the drift of it everything.

Whitman, Walt

17.

Thy books should, like thy friends, not many be, yet such wherein men may thy judgment see.

Wycherley, William

18.

Books are lighthouses erected in the great sea of time.

Whipple, Edwin P.

19.

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.

20.

Beware of the person of one book.

Aquinas, St. Thomas

21.

Fiction reveals truth that reality obscures.

West, Jessamyn

22.

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

Lytton, Lord Edward

23.

A book that is shut is but a block.

Fuller, Thomas

24.

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

25.

Books are the best of things if well used; if abused, among the worst. They are good for nothing but to inspire. I had better never see a book than be warped by its attraction clean out of my own orbit, and made a satellite instead of a system.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

26.

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

Mccay, James T.

27.

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

28.

The books that the world calls immoral are the books that show the world its own shame.

Wilde, Oscar

29.

Beware you be not swallowed up in books! An ounce of love is worth a pound of knowledge.

Wesley, John

30.

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

Mencken, H. L.

31.

The last thing one discovers in composing a work is what to put first.

Pascal, Blaise

32.

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

33.

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

34.

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

Porter, Noah

35.

What is reading, but silent conversation.

Landor, Walter Savage

36.

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

37.

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.

38.

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

39.

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

40.

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

41.

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

42.

If I have not read a book before, it is, for all intents and purposes, new to me whether it was printed yesterday or three hundred years ago.

Hazlitt, William

43.

The constant habit of perusing devout books is so indispensable, that it has been termed the oil of the lamp of prayer. Too much reading, however, and too little meditation, may produce the effect of a lamp inverted; which is extinguished by the very excess of that ailment, whose property is to feed it.

More, Hannah

44.

The book you don't read won't help.

Rohn, Jim

45.

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

Byron, Lord

46.

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

47.

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

Blackie, Professor

48.

The more sins you confess, the more books you will sell.

Proverb, American

49.

Once we have learned to read, meaning of words can somehow register without consciousness.

Marcel, Anthony

50.

The books that everybody admires are those that nobody reads.