Motivational Quotes

Books - reading

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

- Spielberg, Steven

Best Quotes about Books - reading

A wicked book cannot repent.

Proverb

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

What is reading, but silent conversation.

Landor, Walter Savage

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

Beware of the person of one book.

Aquinas, St. Thomas

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

Brookner, Anita

A library is thought in cold storage.

Samuel, Herbert

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

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

Mencken, H. L.

10.

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

11.

Read Homer once, and you can read no more. For all books else appear so mean, and so poor. Verse will seem prose; but still persist to read, and Homer will be all the books you need.

Buckingham, Duke of

12.

A book worth reading is worth buying.

Ruskin, John

13.

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

14.

Without books the development of civilization would have been impossible. They are the engines of change, windows on the world, Lighthouses as the poet said erected in the sea of time. They are companions, teachers, magicians, bankers of the treasures of the mind, Books are humanity in print.

Schopenhauer, Arthur

15.

I used to walk to school with my nose buried in a book.

Coolio

16.

There is a set of religious, or rather moral, writings which teach that virtue is the certain road to happiness, and vice to misery in this world. A very wholesome and comfortable doctrine, and to which we have but one objection, namely, that it is not true.

Fielding, Henry

17.

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

Belloc, Hilaire

18.

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

Hadas, Moses

19.

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

Pound, Ezra

20.

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

Ruskin, John

21.

No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader.

Frost, Robert

22.

To read too many books is harmful.

Zedong, Mao

23.

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

24.

There are worse crimes than burning books. One of them is not reading them.

Brodsky, Joseph

25.

If a book comes from the heart it will contrive to reach other hearts. All art and author craft are of small account to that.

Carlyle, Thomas

26.

My books kept me from the ring, the dog-pit, the tavern, and the saloon.

Hood, Thomas

27.

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

Faulkner, William

28.

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

29.

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

Erasmus, Desiderius

30.

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

Bevan, Aneurin

31.

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

32.

Until it is kindled by a spirit as flamingly alive as the one which gave it birth a book is dead to us. Words divested of their magic are but dead hieroglyphs.

Miller, Henry

33.

What gunpowder did for war the printing press has done for the mind.

Phillips, Wendell

34.

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

35.

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

36.

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

37.

A novel is never anything, but a philosophy put into images.

Camus, Albert

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.

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

Carlyle, Thomas

40.

You've really got to start hitting the books because it's no joke out here.

Lee, Spike

41.

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.

42.

An empty book is like an infant's soul, in which anything may be written. It is capable of all things, but containeth nothing. I have a mind to fill this with profitable wonders.

Traherne, Thomas

43.

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

44.

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

Channing, William Ellery

45.

I am a part of everything that I have read.

Kieran, John

46.

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

Joubert, Joseph

47.

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

Byron, Lord

48.

Every abridgement of a good book is a fool abridged.

Montaigne, Michel Eyquem De

49.

It does not follow because many books are written by persons born in America that there exists an American literature. Books which imitate or represent the thoughts and life of Europe do not constitute an American literature. Before such can exist, an original idea must animate this nation and fresh currents of life must call into life fresh thoughts along the shore.

Fuller, Margaret

50.

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