Motivational Quotes

Books - reading

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

- Spielberg, Steven

Best Quotes about Books - reading

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

There is no robber worse than a bad book.

Proverb, Italian

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

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

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.

The great American novel has not only already been written, it has already been rejected.

Dane, Frank

The books that the world calls immoral are the books that show the world its own shame.

Wilde, Oscar

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

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

10.

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

Lichtenberg, Georg C.

11.

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

Jackson, Holbrook

12.

The age of the book is almost gone.

Steiner, George

13.

Books to judicious compilers, are useful; to particular arts and professions, they are absolutely necessary; to men of real science, they are tools: but more are tools to them.

Johnson

14.

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

Whitman, Walt

15.

The newest books are those that never grow old.

Jackson, George Holbrook

16.

Who ever converses among old books will be hard to please among the new.

Temple, Sir William

17.

Readers are less and less seen as mere non-writers, the subhuman other or flawed derivative of the author; the lack of a pen is no longer a shameful mark of secondary status but a positively enabling space, just as within every writer can be seen to lurk, as a repressed but contaminating antithesis, a reader.

Eagleton, Terry

18.

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

Bevan, Aneurin

19.

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

20.

Beware of the person of one book.

Aquinas, St. Thomas

21.

Today a reader, tomorrow a leader.

Fusselman, W.

22.

The good of a book lies in its being read. A book is made up of signs that speak of other signs, which in their turn speak of things. Without an eye to read them, a book contains signs that produce no concepts; therefore it is dumb.

Eco, Umberto

23.

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

24.

A good book, in the language of the book-sellers, is a salable one; in that of the curious, a scarce one; in that of men of sense, a useful and instructive one.

Chambers, Oswald

25.

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

26.

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

27.

Books are lighthouses erected in the great sea of time.

Whipple, Edwin P.

28.

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

29.

There is creative reading as well as creative writing.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

30.

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.

31.

Hypocrite reader -- my fellow -- my brother!

Baudelaire, Charles

32.

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

Carlyle, Thomas

33.

I wish I could write a beautiful book to break those hearts that are soon to cease to exist: a book of faith and small neat worlds and of people who live by the philosophies of popular songs.

34.

Books are masters who instruct us without rods or ferules, without words or anger, without bread or money. If you approach them, they are not asleep; if you seek them, they do not hide; if you blunder, they do not scold; if you are ignorant, they do not laugh at you.

Bury, Richard De

35.

Reading is equivalent to thinking with someone else's head instead of with one's own.

Schopenhauer, Arthur

36.

There are people who read too much: bibliobibuli. I know some who are constantly drunk on books, as other men are drunk on whiskey or religion. They wander through this most diverting and stimulating of worlds in a haze, seeing nothing and hearing nothing.

Mencken, H. L.

37.

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

Forster, Edward M.

38.

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

39.

Who kills a man kills a reasonable creature, God's image, but thee who destroys a good book, kills reason itself.

Milton, John

40.

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