Motivational Quotes

Books - reading

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

Best Quotes about Books - reading

A good title is the title of a successful book.

Chandler, Raymond

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

Our high respect for a well read person is praise enough for literature.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

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

Mansfield, Katherine

Happy is he who has laid up in his youth, and held fast in all fortune, a genuine and passionate love for reading.

Choate, Rufus

Don't just read the easy stuff. You may be entertained by it, but you will never grow from it.

Rohn, Jim

Of all the ways of acquiring books, writing them oneself is regarded as the most praiseworthy method. Writers are really people who write books not because they are poor, but because they are dissatisfied with the books which they could buy but do not like.

Benjamin, Walter

I am what libraries and librarians have made me, with little assistance from a professor of Greek and poets.

Sandwell, B. K.

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

10.

For a good book has this quality, that it is not merely a petrifaction of its author, but that once it has been tossed behind, like Deucalion's little stone, it acquires a separate and vivid life of its own.

Lejeune, Caroline

11.

The flood of print has turned reading into a process of gulping rather than savoring

Chappell, Warren

12.

This book is not to be tossed lightly aside, but to be hurled with great force.

Parker, Dorothy

13.

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

Wycherley, William

14.

There is no robber worse than a bad book.

Proverb, Italian

15.

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

Phelps, William Lyon

16.

Books give not wisdom where none was before. But where some is, there reading makes it more.

Harington, John

17.

Until I feared I would lose it, I never loved to read. One does not love breathing.

Lee, Harper

18.

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

19.

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.

20.

'Tis the good reader that makes the good book; in every book he finds passages which seem to be confidences or sides hidden from all else and unmistakably meant for his ear; the profit of books is according to the sensibility of the reader; the profound thought or passion sleeps as in a mine, until it is discovered by an equal mind and heart.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

21.

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

Hood, Thomas

22.

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

Lichtenberg, Georg C.

23.

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

Montagu, Lady Mary Wortley

24.

When I get a little money, I buy books; and if any is left I buy food and clothes.

Erasmus, Desiderius

25.

A book that is shut is but a block.

Fuller, Thomas

26.

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

Whitman, Walt

27.

I suggest that the only books that influence us are those for which we are ready, and which have gone a little further down our particular path than we have yet got ourselves.

Forster, Edward M.

28.

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

Channing, William Ellery

29.

Everywhere I have sought rest and not found it, except sitting in a corner by myself with a little book.

Kempis, Thomas

30.

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

Bevan, Aneurin

31.

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

Lytton, Lord Edward

32.

Every abridgement of a good book is a fool abridged.

Montaigne, Michel Eyquem De

33.

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

Hunt, Leigh

34.

Books are but waste paper unless we spend in action the wisdom we get from thought -- asleep. When we are weary of the living, we may repair to the dead, who have nothing of peevishness, pride, or design in their conversation.

Collier, Jeremy

35.

Surviving and thriving as a professional today demands two new approaches to the written word. First, it requires a new approach to orchestrating information, by skillfully choosing what to read and what to ignore. Second, it requires a new approach to integrating information, by reading faster and with greater comprehension.

Calano, Jimmy

36.

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

Lawrence, D. H.

37.

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

Murray, William

38.

I am a part of everything that I have read.

Kieran, John

39.

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

40.

Books constitute capital. A library book lasts as long as a house, for hundreds of years. It is not, then, an article of mere consumption but fairly of capital, and often in the case of professional men, setting out in life, it is their only capital.

Jefferson, Thomas

41.

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

42.

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

Pascal, Blaise

43.

The reason a writer writes a book is to forget a book and the reason a reader reads one is to remember it.

Wolfe, Thomas

44.

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

45.

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.

46.

Early in the morning, at break of day, in all the freshness and dawn of one's strength, to read a book --I call that vicious!

Nietzsche, Friedrich

47.

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

Carlyle, Thomas

48.

The worst readers are those who behave like plundering troops: they take away a few things they can use, dirty and confound the remainder, and revile the whole.

Nietzsche, Friedrich

49.

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

Porter, Noah

50.

A book is a mirror: If an ass peers into it, you can't expect an apostle to look out.

Lichtenberg, Georg C.