Motivational Quotes

Books - reading

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

- Spielberg, Steven

Best Quotes about Books - reading

There is no robber worse than a bad book.

Proverb, Italian

A bad book is as much of a labor to write as a good one; it comes as sincerely from the author's soul.

Huxley, Aldous

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

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

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

Bach, Richard

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

Hugo, Victor

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

Joubert, Joseph

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

To read too many books is harmful.

Zedong, Mao

10.

A book worth reading is worth buying.

Ruskin, John

11.

The real risks for any artist are taken in pushing the work to the limits of what is possible, in the attempt to increase the sum of what it is possible to think. Books become good when they go to this edge and risk falling over it --when they endanger the artist by reason of what he has, or has not, artistically dared.

Rushdie, Salman

12.

Reading a book is like re-writing it for yourself. You bring to a novel, anything you read, all your experience of the world. You bring your history and you read it in your own terms.

Carter, Angela

13.

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.

14.

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

Butler, Samuel

15.

The books that everybody admires are those that nobody reads.

France, Anatole

16.

He that loves a book will never want a faithful friend, a wholesome counselor, a cheerful companion, an effectual comforter. By study, by reading, by thinking, one may innocently divert and pleasantly entertain himself, as in all weathers, as in all fortunes.

Barrow

17.

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.

18.

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

19.

The tools I need for my work are paper, tobacco, food, and a little whiskey.

Faulkner, William

20.

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

21.

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

22.

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

Lawrence, D. H.

23.

Except a living man there is nothing more wonderful than a book! a message to us from the dead -- from human souls we never saw, who lived, perhaps, thousands of miles away. And yet these, in those little sheets of paper, speak to us, arouse us, terrify us, teach us, comfort us, open their hearts to us as brothers.

Kingsley, Charles

24.

Fiction reveals truth that reality obscures.

West, Jessamyn

25.

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

Ruskin, John

26.

Books are those faithful mirrors that reflect to our mind the minds of sages and heroes.

Gibbon, Edward

27.

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

Dawkins, John

28.

A book that is shut is but a block.

Fuller, Thomas

29.

It is from books that wise people derive consolation in the troubles of life.

Hugo, Victor

30.

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

Shaw, George Bernard

31.

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

Lichtenberg, Georg C.

32.

The world may be full of fourth-rate writers but it's also full of fourth-rate readers.

Barstow, Stan

33.

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

Lytton, Lord Edward

34.

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

35.

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

36.

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

37.

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

38.

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

Asimov, Isaac

39.

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

Channing, William Ellery

40.

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

Byron, Lord

41.

When we read a story, we inhabit it. The covers of the book are like a roof and four walls. What is to happen next will take place within the four walls of the story. And this is possible because the story's voice makes everything its own.

Berger, John

42.

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

Colton, Charles Caleb

43.

Read good, big important things.

Noonan, Peggy

44.

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

Chappell, Warren

45.

This will never be a civilized country until we expend more money for books than we do for chewing gum.