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

A man ought to read just as his inclination leads him; for what he reads as a task will do him little good.

Johnson, Samuel

A book worth reading is worth buying.

Ruskin, John

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

Adler, Mortimer J.

He had read much, if one considers his long life; but his contemplation was much more than his reading. He was wont to say that if he had read as much as other men he should have known no more than other men.

Aubrey, John

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

Lytton, Lord Edward

I've never know any trouble than an hour's reading didn't assuage.

Secondat, Charles de

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

Books succeed, and lives fail.

Browning, Elizabeth Barrett

It is from books that wise people derive consolation in the troubles of life.

Hugo, Victor

10.

Prerequisite for rereadability in books: that they be forgettable.

Rostand, Jean

11.

The newest books are those that never grow old.

Jackson, George Holbrook

12.

The good parts of a book may be only something a writer is lucky enough to overhear or it may be the wreck of his whole damn life --and one is as good as the other.

Hemingway, Ernest

13.

Fiction reveals truth that reality obscures.

West, Jessamyn

14.

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

Brookner, Anita

15.

Next, in importance to books are their titles.

Davies, Paul

16.

The unread story is not a story; it is little black marks on wood pulp. The reader, reading it, makes it live: a live thing, a story.

Guin, Ursula K. Le

17.

Books are the blessed chloroform of the mind.

Chambers, Robert

18.

There is more treasure in books than in all the pirates loot on Treasure Island and best of all, you can enjoy these riches every day of your life.

Disney, Walt

19.

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.

20.

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

Descartes, Rene

21.

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.

22.

One always tends to overpraise a long book, because one has got through it.

Forster, Edward M.

23.

A book is a part of life, a manifestation of life, just as much as a tree or a horse or a star. It obeys its own rhythms, its own laws, whether it be a novel, a play, or a diary. The deep, hidden rhythm of life is always there -- that of the pulse, the heart beat.

Miller, Henry

24.

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

25.

No matter how busy you may think you are, you must find time for reading, or surrender yourself to self-chosen ignorance.

Townsend, Atwood H.

26.

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

27.

What is reading, but silent conversation.

Landor, Walter Savage

28.

Read Homer once, and you can read no more. For all books else appear so mean, and so poor. Verse will seem prose; but still persist to read, and Homer will be all the books you need.

Buckingham, Duke of

29.

'Tis pleasant, sure, to see one's name in print; A book's a book, although there's nothing in it.

Byron, Lord

30.

Hypocrite reader -- my fellow -- my brother!

Baudelaire, Charles

31.

To learn to read is to light a fire; every syllable that is spelled out is a spark.

Hugo, Victor

32.

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

Voltaire

33.

The mere brute pleasure of reading --the sort of pleasure a cow must have in grazing.

Chesterton, Gilbert K.

34.

If a secret history of books could be written, and the author's private thoughts and meanings noted down alongside of his story, how many insipid volumes would become interesting, and dull tales excite the reader!

Thackeray, William M.

35.

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

36.

Read good, big important things.

Noonan, Peggy

37.

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

Belloc, Hilaire

38.

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

Hope, Anthony

39.

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

40.

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.

41.

All my good reading, you might say, was done in the toilet. There are passages in Ulysses which can be read only in the toilet -- if one wants to extract the full flavor of their content.

Miller, Henry

42.

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

Pound, Ezra

43.

A multitude of books distracts the mind.

Socrates

44.

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

45.

God be thanked for books; they are the voices of the distant and the dead, and make us heirs of the spiritual life of past ages.

Channing, William Ellery

46.

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

Mallarme, Stephane

47.

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.

48.

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

49.

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

50.

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

Marcel, Anthony