Motivational Quotes

Books - reading

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

Best Quotes about Books - reading

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

Belloc, Hilaire

A good book, in the language of the book-sellers, is a salable one; in that of the curious, a scarce one; in that of men of sense, a useful and instructive one.

Chambers, Oswald

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

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

Temple, Sir William

Readers are less and less seen as mere non-writers, the subhuman other or flawed derivative of the author; the lack of a pen is no longer a shameful mark of secondary status but a positively enabling space, just as within every writer can be seen to lurk, as a repressed but contaminating antithesis, a reader.

Eagleton, Terry

A wicked book cannot repent.

Proverb

What is reading, but silent conversation.

Landor, Walter Savage

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

I divide all readers into two classes: those who read to remember and those who read to forget.

Phelps, William Lyon

10.

Books are men of higher stature; the only men that speak aloud for future times to hear.

Barrett, E.S.

11.

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

Blackie, Professor

12.

I am not a speed reader. I am a speed understander.

Asimov, Isaac

13.

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

Carlyle, Thomas

14.

Every man is a volume if you know how to read him.

Channing, William Ellery

15.

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

16.

Books are lighthouses erected in the great sea of time.

Whipple, Edwin P.

17.

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

Wycherley, William

18.

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

19.

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

Adler, Mortimer J.

20.

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

Mansfield, Katherine

21.

All the best stories in the world are but one story in reality -- the story of escape. It is the only thing which interests us all and at all times, how to escape.

Benson, Arthur Christopher

22.

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

Lawrence, D. H.

23.

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

Morely, John

24.

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

Frost, Robert

25.

Old books that have ceased to be of service should no more be abandoned than should old friends who have ceased to give pleasure.

Worsthorne, Sir Peregrine

26.

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

27.

Fiction reveals truth that reality obscures.

West, Jessamyn

28.

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

29.

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

30.

It does not follow because many books are written by persons born in America that there exists an American literature. Books which imitate or represent the thoughts and life of Europe do not constitute an American literature. Before such can exist, an original idea must animate this nation and fresh currents of life must call into life fresh thoughts along the shore.

Fuller, Margaret

31.

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

32.

Much reading is an oppression of the mind, and extinguishes the natural candle, which is the reason of so many senseless scholars in the world.

Penn, William

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.

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

35.

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

Wesley, John

36.

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

Lichtenberg, Georg C.

37.

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.

38.

A real book is not one that we read, but one that reads us.

Auden, W. H.

39.

This will never be a civilized country until we expend more money for books than we do for chewing gum.

Hubbard, Elbert

40.

Books are standing counselors and preachers, always at hand, and always disinterested; having this advantage over oral instructors, that they are ready to repeat their lesson as often as we please.

Chambers, Oswald

41.

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

42.

Do we write books so that they shall merely be read? Don't we also write them for employment in the household? For one that is read from start to finish, thousands are leafed through, other thousands lie motionless, others are jammed against mouseholes, thrown at rats, others are stood on, sat on, drummed on, have gingerbread baked on them or are used to light pipes.

Lichtenberg, Georg C.

43.

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

Faulkner, William

44.

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

45.

Books are not men and yet they stay alive.

Benet, Stephen Vincent

46.

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

47.

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

Disraeli, Benjamin

48.

There is creative reading as well as creative writing.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

49.

A good title is the title of a successful book.

Chandler, Raymond

50.

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.