Motivational Quotes

Books - reading

A multitude of books distracts the mind.

- Socrates

Best Quotes about Books - reading

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

Old books, you know well, are books of the world's youth, and new books are the fruits of its age.

Holmes, Oliver Wendell

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

Brookner, Anita

A bad book is the worse that it cannot repent. It has not been the devil's policy to keep the masses of mankind in ignorance; but finding that they will read, he is doing all in his power to poison their books.

Kirk, E.N.

The novel can't compete with cars, the movies, television, and liquor. A guy who's had a good feed and tanked up on good wine gives his old lady a kiss after supper and his day is over. Finished.

Celine, Louis-Ferdinand

Old books that have ceased to be of service should no more be abandoned than should old friends who have ceased to give pleasure.

Worsthorne, Sir Peregrine

I always like to look on the optimistic side of life, but I am realistic enough to know that life is a complex matter.

Disney, Walt

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

If I had my way books would not be written in English, but in an exceedingly difficult secret language that only skilled professional readers and story-tellers could interpret. Then people like you would have to go to public halls and pay good prices to hear the professionals decode and read the books aloud for you. This plan would have the advantage of scaring off all amateur authors, retired politicians, country doctors and I-Married-a-Midget writers who would not have the patience to learn the secret language.

Davies, Robertson

10.

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

Forster, Edward M.

11.

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

12.

Many books require no thought from those who read them, and for a very simple reason: they made no such demand upon those who wrote them. Those works, therefore, are the most valuable, that set our thinking faculties in the fullest operation. understand them.

Clarendon

13.

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

Gibbon, Edward

14.

The oldest books are still only just out to those who have not read them.

Butler, Samuel

15.

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

Wesley, John

16.

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

Rochman, Hazel

17.

Books, books, books had found the secret of a garret-room piled high with cases in my father's name; Piled high, packed large, --where, creeping in and out among the giant fossils of my past, like some small nimble mouse between the ribs of a mastodon, I nibbled here and there at this or that box, pulling through the gap, in heats of terror, haste, victorious joy, the first book first. And how I felt it beat under my pillow, in the morning's dark. An hour before the sun would let me read! My books!

Browning, Elizabeth Barrett

18.

Everything you need for better future and success has already been written. And guess what? All you have to do is go to the library.

Rohn, Jim

19.

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

Jackson, Holbrook

20.

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

Phelps, William Lyon

21.

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

22.

There is no such thing as a moral book or an immoral book. Books are well written or badly written. That is all.

Wilde, Oscar

23.

Thank you for sending me a copy of your book -- I'll waste no time reading it.

Hadas, Moses

24.

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

Tupper, Martin

25.

Books had instant replay long before televised sports.

Williams, Bert

26.

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

27.

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

Locke, John

28.

Books are men of higher stature; the only men that speak aloud for future times to hear.

Barrett, E.S.

29.

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

Porter, Noah

30.

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

Bach, Richard

31.

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

Adler, Mortimer J.

32.

A person of mature years and ripe development, who is expecting nothing from literature but the corroboration and renewal of past ideas, may find satisfaction in a lucidity so complete as to occasion no imaginative excitement, but young and ambitious students are not content with it. They seek the excitement because they are capable of the growth that it accompanies.

Cooley, Charles Horton

33.

Books succeed, and lives fail.

Browning, Elizabeth Barrett

34.

Books are the bees which carry the quickening pollen from one to another mind.

Lowell, James Russell

35.

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

Lawrence, D. H.

36.

Does there, I wonder, exist a being who has read all, or approximately all, that the person of average culture is supposed to have read, and that not to have read is a social sin? If such a being does exist, surely he is an old, a very old man.

Bennett, Arnold

37.

I love to lose myself in other men's minds. When I am not walking, I am reading. I cannot sit and think; books think for me.

Lamb, Charles

38.

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.

39.

Books are lighthouses erected in the great sea of time.

Whipple, Edwin P.

40.

Very young children eat their books, literally devouring their contents. This is one reason for the scarcity of first editions of Alice in Wonderland and other favorites of the nursery.

Rosenbach, A. S. W.

41.

The reading or non-reading a book will never keep down a single petticoat.

Byron, Lord

42.

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.

43.

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

Mallarme, Stephane

44.

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

Pascal, Blaise

45.

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

Marcel, Anthony

46.

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

47.

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

48.

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

Lichtenberg, Georg C.

49.

No furniture is so charming as books.

Smith, Sydney

50.

After all manner of professors have done their best for us, the place we are to get knowledge is in books. The true university of these days is a collection of books.

Carlyle, Thomas