Motivational Quotes

Books - reading

Then I though of reading -- the nice and subtle happiness of reading ... this joy not dulled by age, this polite and unpunishable vice, this selfish, serene, lifelong intoxication.

- Smith, Logan Pearsall

Best Quotes about Books - reading

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

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

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

Hugo, Victor

Books are divided into two classes, the books of the hour and the books of all time.

Ruskin, John

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.

I know every book of mine by its smell, and I have but to put my nose between the pages to be reminded of all sorts of things.

Gissing, George Robert

The books we think we ought to read are poky, dull, and dry; The books that we would like to read we are ashamed to buy; The books that people talk about we never can recall; And the books that people give us, oh, they're the worst of all.

Wells, Carolyn

One half who graduate from college never read another book.

True, Herbert

No man understands a deep book until he has seen and lived at least part of its contents.

Pound, Ezra

10.

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

Phelps, William Lyon

11.

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

Rohn, Jim

12.

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

Harington, John

13.

The books that everybody admires are those that nobody reads.

France, Anatole

14.

No furniture is so charming as books.

Smith, Sydney

15.

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.

16.

Education... has produced a vast population able to read but unable to distinguish what is worth reading, an easy prey to sensations and cheap appeals.

Trevelyan, G. M.

17.

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

18.

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

19.

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

Porter, Noah

20.

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

Locke, John

21.

A good book is the best of friends, the same today and for ever.

Tupper, Martin

22.

Books had instant replay long before televised sports.

Williams, Bert

23.

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

24.

Reading the Scriptures is an uplifting experience.

25.

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

26.

I heard his library burned down and both books were destroyed -- and one of them hadn't even been colored in yet.

Dawkins, John

27.

The newest books are those that never grow old.

Jackson, George Holbrook

28.

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.

29.

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

Wesley, John

30.

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

Belloc, Hilaire

31.

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

32.

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

Rochman, Hazel

33.

Only a generation of readers will span a generation of writers.

Spielberg, Steven

34.

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

35.

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

36.

The successful Accelerated Reader is able to read larger than normal blocks or bites of the printed page with each eye stop. He has accepted, without reservation, the philosophy that the most important benefit of reading is the gaining of information, ideas, mental picture and entertainment-not the fretting over words. He has come to the realization that words in and of themselves are for the most part insignificant.

Cutler, Wade E.

37.

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

38.

There is creative reading as well as creative writing.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

39.

A book that is shut is but a block.

Fuller, Thomas

40.

There are two kinds of books. Those that no one reads and those that no one ought to read.

Mencken, H. L.

41.

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

Blackie, Professor

42.

A novel must be exceptionally good to live as long as the average cat.

Maclennan, Hugh

43.

A bibliophile of little means is likely to suffer often. Books don't slip from his hands but fly past him through the air, high as birds, high as prices.

Neruda, Pablo

44.

The greatest gift is the passion for reading. It is cheap, it consoles, it distracts, it excites, it gives you knowledge of the world and experience of a wide kind. It is a moral illumination.

Hardwick, Elizabeth

45.

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

46.

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

Bach, Richard

47.

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

48.

As writers become more numerous, it is natural for readers to become more indolent; whence must necessarily arise a desire of attaining knowledge with the greatest possible ease.

Goldsmith, Oliver

49.

I feel a kind of reverence for the first books of young authors. There is so much aspiration in them, so much audacious hope and trembling fear, so much of the heart's history, that all errors and shortcomings are for a while lost sight of in the amiable self assertion of youth.

Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth

50.

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