Motivational Quotes

Books - reading

A book is like a man -- clever and dull, brave and cowardly, beautiful and ugly. For every flowering thought there will be a page like a wet and mangy mongrel, and for every looping flight a tap on the wing and a reminder that wax cannot hold the feathers firm too near the sun.

- Steinbeck, John

Best Quotes about Books - reading

What is reading, but silent conversation.

Landor, Walter Savage

Ideally a book would have no order to it, and the reader would have to discover his own.

Vaneigem, Raoul

People are much more willing to lend you books than bookcases.

Twain, Mark

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

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

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

Shaw, George Bernard

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

Gibbon, Edward

A multitude of books distracts the mind.

Socrates

We should be as careful of the books we read, as of the company we keep. The dead very often have more power than the living.

Edwards, Tryon

10.

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

11.

A novel is a mirror carried along a main road.

Stendhal, Henri B.

12.

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

13.

Every abridgement of a good book is a fool abridged.

Montaigne, Michel Eyquem De

14.

A house is not a home unless it contains food and fire for the mind as well as the body.

Fuller, Margaret

15.

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

16.

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.

17.

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

18.

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

19.

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

20.

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

21.

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

22.

The books one has written in the past have two surprises in store: one couldn't write them again, and wouldn't want to.

Rostand, Jean

23.

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

24.

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

Mencken, H. L.

25.

A man ought to read just as his inclination leads him; for what he reads as a task will do him little good.

Johnson, Samuel

26.

Then I though of reading -- the nice and subtle happiness of reading ... this joy not dulled by age, this polite and unpunishable vice, this selfish, serene, lifelong intoxication.

Smith, Logan Pearsall

27.

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.

28.

He has only half learned the art of reading who has not added to it the more refined art of skipping and skimming.

Balfour, Arthur James

29.

The book to read is not the one which thinks for you, but the one which makes you think. No book in the world equals the Bible for that.

Mccosh

30.

No matter how busy you may think you are, you must find time for reading, or surrender yourself to self-chosen ignorance.

Townsend, Atwood H.

31.

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

Schopenhauer, Arthur

32.

Beware of the person of one book.

Aquinas, St. Thomas

33.

The mere brute pleasure of reading --the sort of pleasure a cow must have in grazing.

Chesterton, Gilbert K.

34.

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.

35.

To buy books would be a good thing if we also could buy the time to read them.

Schopenhauer, Arthur

36.

The pleasure of reading is doubled when one lives with another who shares the same books.

Mansfield, Katherine

37.

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

Byron, Lord

38.

Today a reader, tomorrow a leader.

Fusselman, W.

39.

I am what libraries and librarians have made me, with little assistance from a professor of Greek and poets.

Sandwell, B. K.

40.

The most foolish kind of a book is a kind of leaky boat on the sea of wisdom; some of the wisdom will get in anyhow.

Holmes, Oliver Wendell

41.

I don't think any good book is based on factual experience. Bad books are about things the writer already knew before he wrote them.

Fuentes, Carlos

42.

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

43.

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.

44.

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

Bevan, Aneurin

45.

All the known world, excepting only savage nations, is governed by books.

Voltaire

46.

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

Carlyle, Thomas

47.

Books are not men and yet they stay alive.

Benet, Stephen Vincent

48.

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

49.

To read too many books is harmful.

Zedong, Mao

50.

Read nothing that you do not care to remember, and remember nothing you do not mean to use.

Blackie, Professor