Motivational Quotes

Books - reading

How can you dare teach a man to read until you've taught him everything else first?

- Shaw, George Bernard

Best Quotes about Books - reading

The books we read should be chosen with great care, that they may be, as an Egyptian king wrote over his library, The medicines of the soul.

Hood, Paxton

The failure to read good books both enfeebles the vision and strengthens our most fatal tendency --the belief that the here and now is all there is.

Bloom, Allan

In the case of good books, the point is not how many of them you can get through, but rather how many can get through to you.

Adler, Mortimer J.

The Brahmins say that in their books there are many predictions of times in which it will rain. But press those books as strongly as you can, you can not get out of them a drop of water. So you can not get out of all the books that contain the best precepts the smallest good deed.

Tolstoy, Count Leo

Reading furnishes the mind only with material for knowledge; it is thinking that makes what we read ours.

Locke, John

The reading of all good books is like a conversation with all the finest men of past centuries.

Descartes, Rene

My books kept me from the ring, the dog-pit, the tavern, and the saloon.

Hood, Thomas

I used to walk to school with my nose buried in a book.

Coolio

To read too many books is harmful.

Zedong, Mao

10.

I am a part of everything that I have read.

Kieran, John

11.

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

12.

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

13.

In the dark colony of night, when I consider man's magnificent capacity for malice, madness, folly, envy, rage, and destructiveness, and I wonder whether we shall not end up as breakfast for newts and polyps, I seem to hear the muffled cries of all the words in all the books with covers closed.

Rosten, Leo

14.

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

Rohn, Jim

15.

A dose of poison can do its work but once. A bad book can go on poisoning minds for generations.

Murray, William

16.

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

17.

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

Belloc, Hilaire

18.

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

Pascal, Blaise

19.

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.

20.

The classics are only primitive literature. They belong to the same class as primitive machinery and primitive music and primitive medicine.

Leacock, Stephen B.

21.

How many a man has dated a new era in his life from the reading of a book! The book exists for us, perchance, that will explain our miracles and reveal new ones. The at present unutterable things we may find somewhere uttered.

Thoreau, Henry David

22.

Every abridgement of a good book is a fool abridged.

Montaigne, Michel Eyquem De

23.

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

24.

Some of the most famous books are the least worth reading. Their fame was due to their having done something that needed to be doing in their day. The work is done and the virtue of the book has expired.

Morely, John

25.

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

Vaneigem, Raoul

26.

There is creative reading as well as creative writing.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

27.

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

Bach, Richard

28.

No entertainment is so cheap as reading, nor is any pleasure so lasting.

Montagu, Lady Mary Wortley

29.

With one day's reading a man may have the key in his hands.

Pound, Ezra

30.

The newest books are those that never grow old.

Jackson, George Holbrook

31.

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.

32.

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

33.

Everything in the world exists to end up in a book.

Mallarme, Stephane

34.

The reason that fiction is more interesting than any other form of literature, to those who really like to study people, is that in fiction the author can really tell the truth without humiliating himself.

Roosevelt, Eleanor

35.

A house without books is like a room without windows. No man has a right to bring up his children without surrounding them with books, if he has the means to buy them. It is a wrong to his family. Children learn to read by being in the presence of books. The love of knowledge comes with reading and grows upon it. And the love of knowledge, in a young mind, is almost always a warrant against the inferior excitement of passions and vices.

Mann, Horace

36.

No furniture is so charming as books.

Smith, Sydney

37.

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

38.

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

39.

Beware of the person of one book.

Aquinas, St. Thomas

40.

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

Hope, Anthony

41.

A book that is shut is but a block.

Fuller, Thomas

42.

The lessons taught in great books are misleading. The commerce in life is rarely so simple and never so just.

Brookner, Anita

43.

I can't bear art that you can walk round and admire. A book should be either a bandit or a rebel or a man in the crowd.

Lawrence, D. H.

44.

Fiction reveals truth that reality obscures.

West, Jessamyn

45.

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

Chamfort, Sebastien-Roch Nicolas De

46.

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

47.

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.

48.

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

49.

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

Gibbon, Edward

50.

Books that you carry to the fire, and hold readily in your hand, are most useful after all.

Johnson, Samuel