Motivational Quotes

Books - reading

A novel is a mirror carried along a main road.

- Stendhal, Henri B.

Best Quotes about Books - reading

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

Morely, John

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

Parker, Dorothy

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

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

Twain, Mark

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

Forster, Edward M.

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

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.

If I had my way books would not be written in English, but in an exceedingly difficult secret language that only skilled professional readers and story-tellers could interpret. Then people like you would have to go to public halls and pay good prices to hear the professionals decode and read the books aloud for you. This plan would have the advantage of scaring off all amateur authors, retired politicians, country doctors and I-Married-a-Midget writers who would not have the patience to learn the secret language.

Davies, Robertson

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

10.

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

11.

He had read much, if one considers his long life; but his contemplation was much more than his reading. He was wont to say that if he had read as much as other men he should have known no more than other men.

Aubrey, John

12.

There is creative reading as well as creative writing.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

13.

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

Bach, Richard

14.

Books are the best of things if well used; if abused, among the worst. They are good for nothing but to inspire. I had better never see a book than be warped by its attraction clean out of my own orbit, and made a satellite instead of a system.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

15.

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

16.

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

Temple, Sir William

17.

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

Lichtenberg, Georg C.

18.

Books that you carry to the fire, and hold readily in your hand, are most useful after all.

Johnson, Samuel

19.

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

20.

The more sins you confess, the more books you will sell.

Proverb, American

21.

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

22.

The only books that influence us are those for which we are ready, and which have gone a little farther down our particular path than we have yet got ourselves.

Forster, Edward M.

23.

Books are the blessed chloroform of the mind.

Chambers, Robert

24.

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

25.

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

Camus, Albert

26.

No furniture is so charming as books.

Smith, Sydney

27.

Learning to read has been reduced to a process of mastering a series of narrow, specific, hierarchical skills. Where armed-forces recruits learn the components of a rifle or the intricacies of close order drill by the numbers, recruits to reading learn its mechanics sound by sound and word by word.

Gross, Jacquelyn

28.

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

29.

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

Hadas, Moses

30.

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

31.

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

Mencken, H. L.

32.

Much reading is an oppression of the mind, and extinguishes the natural candle, which is the reason of so many senseless scholars in the world.

Penn, William

33.

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

Lee, Spike

34.

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

35.

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

Fuller, Margaret

36.

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

Blackie, Professor

37.

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

38.

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

39.

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

Critchfield, Jim

40.

A successful book cannot afford to be more than ten percent new.

Mcluhan, Marshall

41.

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

42.

'Tis the good reader that makes the good book; in every book he finds passages which seem to be confidences or sides hidden from all else and unmistakably meant for his ear; the profit of books is according to the sensibility of the reader; the profound thought or passion sleeps as in a mine, until it is discovered by an equal mind and heart.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

43.

When a book raises your spirit, and inspires you with noble and manly thoughts, seek for no other test of its excellence. It is good, and made by a good workman.

Bruyere, Jean De La

44.

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

Gibbon, Edward

45.

If I have not read a book before, it is, for all intents and purposes, new to me whether it was printed yesterday or three hundred years ago.

Hazlitt, William

46.

The multitude of books is a great evil. There is no limit to this fever for writing.

Luther, Martin

47.

Books give not wisdom where none was before. But where some is, there reading makes it more.

Harington, John

48.

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

49.

I divide all readers into two classes: those who read to remember and those who read to forget.

Phelps, William Lyon

50.

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