Motivational Quotes

Books - reading

A multitude of books distracts the mind.

- Socrates

Best Quotes about Books - reading

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.

Most books, like their authors, are born to die; of only a few books can it be said that death has no dominion over them; they live, and their influence lives forever.

Swartz, J.

Nine-tenths of the existing books are nonsense and the clever books are the refutation of that nonsense.

Disraeli, Benjamin

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

Bach, Richard

The man who does not read books has no advantage over the man that can not read them.

Twain, Mark

You are wise, witty and wonderful, but you spend too much time reading this sort of stuff.

Critchfield, Jim

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

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

There is no robber worse than a bad book.

Proverb, Italian

10.

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

Bulwer-Lytton, Edward G.

11.

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

12.

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

Parker, Dorothy

13.

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

14.

Next, in importance to books are their titles.

Davies, Paul

15.

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

16.

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

17.

In the dark colony of night, when I consider man's magnificent capacity for malice, madness, folly, envy, rage, and destructiveness, and I wonder whether we shall not end up as breakfast for newts and polyps, I seem to hear the muffled cries of all the words in all the books with covers closed.

Rosten, Leo

18.

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

19.

Books succeed, and lives fail.

Browning, Elizabeth Barrett

20.

You will find most books worth reading are worth reading twice.

Morely, John

21.

There was a time when the world acted on books; now books act on the world.

Joubert, Joseph

22.

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

Wesley, John

23.

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

Rohn, Jim

24.

A great book should leave you with many experiences and slightly exhausted at the end. You should live several lives while reading it.

Styron, William

25.

I am not a speed reader. I am a speed understander.

Asimov, Isaac

26.

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

Mencken, H. L.

27.

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

28.

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

29.

The reason that fiction is more interesting than any other form of literature, to those who really like to study people, is that in fiction the author can really tell the truth without humiliating himself.

Roosevelt, Eleanor

30.

Reading the Scriptures is an uplifting experience.

31.

The books one reads in childhood, and perhaps most of all the bad and good bad books, create in one's mind a sort of false map of the world, a series of fabulous countries into which one can retreat at odd moments throughout the rest of life, and which in some cases can survive a visit to the real countries which they are supposed to represent.

Orwell, George

32.

Miss a meal if you have to, but don't miss a book.

Rohn, Jim

33.

We are too civil to books. For a few golden sentences we will turn over and actually read a volume of four or five hundred pages.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

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.

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

36.

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

37.

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

38.

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

39.

Today a reader, tomorrow a leader.

Fusselman, W.

40.

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

41.

Digressions, incontestably, are the sunshine; they are the life, the soul of reading! Take them out of this book, for instance, --you might as well take the book along with them; --one cold external winter would reign in every page of it; restore them to the writer; --he steps forth like a bridegroom, --bids All-hail; brings in variety, and forbids the appetite to fail.

Sterne, Laurence

42.

Books are the blessed chloroform of the mind.

Chambers, Robert

43.

Read good, big important things.

Noonan, Peggy

44.

I feel like I'm drowning. Every night, I'm carrying home loads of things to read but I'm too exhausted. I keep clipping things and Xeroxing them and planning to read them eventually, but I just end up throwing it all away and feeling guilty.

Levine, Ghita

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.

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

Erasmus, Desiderius

47.

I always begin at the left with the opening word of the sentence and read toward the right and I recommend this method.

Thurber, James

48.

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

49.

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

Rochman, Hazel

50.

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