Motivational Quotes

Books - reading

Here, my dear Lucy, hide these books. Quick, quick! Fling Peregrine Pickle under the toilette --throw Roderick Random into the closet --put The Innocent Adultery into The Whole Duty of Man; thrust Lord Aimworth under the sofa! cram Ovid behind the bolster; there --put The Man of Feeling into your pocket. Now for them.

- Sheridan, Richard Brinsley

Best Quotes about Books - reading

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

Reading the Scriptures is an uplifting experience.

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

A book worth reading is worth buying.

Ruskin, John

Every abridgement of a good book is a fool abridged.

Montaigne, Michel Eyquem De

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

Byron, Lord

A big leather-bound volume makes an ideal razor strap. A thin book is useful to stick under a table with a broken caster to steady it. A large, flat atlas can be used to cover a window with a broken pane. And a thick, old-fashioned heavy book with a clasp is the finest thing in the world to throw at a noisy cat.

Twain, Mark

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

Brookner, Anita

Read as you taste fruit or savor wine, or enjoy friendship, love or life.

Jackson, Holbrook

10.

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

Belloc, Hilaire

11.

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

Lawrence, D. H.

12.

Reading makes immigrants of us all. It takes us away from home, but more important, it finds homes for us everywhere.

Rochman, Hazel

13.

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.

14.

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

Phelps, William Lyon

15.

A library is thought in cold storage.

Samuel, Herbert

16.

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

17.

Reading is to the mind what exercise is to the body. It is wholesome and bracing for the mind to have its faculties kept on the stretch.

Steele, Sir Richard

18.

Begin to read a book that will help you move toward your dream.

Brown, Les

19.

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

20.

Books, like friends, should be few and well chosen. Like friends, too, we should return to them again and again for, like true friends, they will never fail us -- never cease to instruct -- never cloy.

Colton, Charles Caleb

21.

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

22.

Sheridan, Richard Brinsley

23.

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

24.

I am a part of everything that I have read.

Kieran, John

25.

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

Hugo, Victor

26.

After all, the world is not a stage -- not to me: nor a theatre: nor a show-house of any sort. And art, especially novels, are not little theatres where the reader sits aloft and watches... and sighs, commiserates, condones and smiles. That's what you want a book to be: because it leaves you so safe and superior, with your two-dollar ticket to the show. And that's what my books are not and never will be. Whoever reads me will be in the thick of the scrimmage, and if he doesn't like it -- if he wants a safe seat in the audience -- let him read someone else.

Lawrence, D. H.

27.

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

28.

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

Bach, Richard

29.

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

Shaw, George Bernard

30.

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

31.

In science read the newest works, in literature read the oldest.

Bulwer-Lytton, Edward G.

32.

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

Wycherley, William

33.

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

Adler, Mortimer J.

34.

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

Hope, Anthony

35.

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

Forster, Edward M.

36.

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

Brodsky, Joseph

37.

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

Vaneigem, Raoul

38.

A wicked book cannot repent.

Proverb

39.

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

40.

It is books that teach us to refine our pleasures when young, and to recall them with satisfaction when we are old.

Hunt, Leigh

41.

There is a set of religious, or rather moral, writings which teach that virtue is the certain road to happiness, and vice to misery in this world. A very wholesome and comfortable doctrine, and to which we have but one objection, namely, that it is not true.

Fielding, Henry

42.

Read good, big important things.

Noonan, Peggy

43.

Don't ask me who's influenced me. A lion is made up of the lambs he's digested, and I've been reading all my life.

Seferis, Giorgos

44.

The mortality of all inanimate things is terrible to me, but that of books most of all.

Howells, William Dean

45.

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

46.

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.

47.

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

48.

A vacuum of ideas affects people differently than a vacuum of air, otherwise readers of books would be constantly collapsing.

Lichtenberg, Georg C.

49.

Any book that helps a child to form a habit of reading, to make reading one of his deep and continuing needs, is good for him.

McKenna, Richard

50.

Next to acquiring good friends, the best acquisition is that of good books.

Colton, Charles Caleb