Motivational Quotes

Books - reading

A novel is a mirror carried along a main road.

- Stendhal, Henri B.

Best Quotes about Books - reading

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

Channing, William Ellery

Reading is to the mind what exercise is to the body. It is wholesome and bracing for the mind to have its faculties kept on the stretch.

Steele, Sir Richard

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

A book is a mirror: If an ass peers into it, you can't expect an apostle to look out.

Lichtenberg, Georg C.

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

A person who publishes a book appears willfully in public with his pants down.

Millay, Edna St. Vincent

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.

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

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

10.

A book is a part of life, a manifestation of life, just as much as a tree or a horse or a star. It obeys its own rhythms, its own laws, whether it be a novel, a play, or a diary. The deep, hidden rhythm of life is always there -- that of the pulse, the heart beat.

Miller, Henry

11.

Read good, big important things.

Noonan, Peggy

12.

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

Spielberg, Steven

13.

Nine-tenths of the existing books are nonsense and the clever books are the refutation of that nonsense.

Disraeli, Benjamin

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.

Everything you need for better future and success has already been written. And guess what? All you have to do is go to the library.

Rohn, Jim

16.

A multitude of books distracts the mind.

Socrates

17.

A good book is the best of friends, the same today and for ever.

Tupper, Martin

18.

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

19.

A good title is the title of a successful book.

Chandler, Raymond

20.

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

Hugo, Victor

21.

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

22.

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

Butler, Samuel

23.

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

24.

If a secret history of books could be written, and the author's private thoughts and meanings noted down alongside of his story, how many insipid volumes would become interesting, and dull tales excite the reader!

Thackeray, William M.

25.

I've never know any trouble than an hour's reading didn't assuage.

Secondat, Charles de

26.

Books are lighthouses erected in the great sea of time.

Whipple, Edwin P.

27.

Fiction reveals truth that reality obscures.

West, Jessamyn

28.

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

Brodsky, Joseph

29.

Books are but waste paper unless we spend in action the wisdom we get from thought -- asleep. When we are weary of the living, we may repair to the dead, who have nothing of peevishness, pride, or design in their conversation.

Collier, Jeremy

30.

The Bible remained for me a book of books, still divine -- but divine in the sense that all great books are divine which teach men how to live righteously.

Keith, Sir Arthur

31.

Today a reader, tomorrow a leader.

Fusselman, W.

32.

All my good reading, you might say, was done in the toilet. There are passages in Ulysses which can be read only in the toilet -- if one wants to extract the full flavor of their content.

Miller, Henry

33.

Readers are plentiful: thinkers are rare.

Martineau, Harriet

34.

The things I want to know are in books; my best friend is the man who'll get me a book I ain't read.

Lincoln, Abraham

35.

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

36.

Does there, I wonder, exist a being who has read all, or approximately all, that the person of average culture is supposed to have read, and that not to have read is a social sin? If such a being does exist, surely he is an old, a very old man.

Bennett, Arnold

37.

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

38.

Here, my dear Lucy, hide these books. Quick, quick! Fling Peregrine Pickle under the toilette --throw Roderick Random into the closet --put The Innocent Adultery into The Whole Duty of Man; thrust Lord Aimworth under the sofa! cram Ovid behind the bolster; there --put The Man of Feeling into your pocket. Now for them.

Sheridan, Richard Brinsley

39.

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

40.

A novel points out that the world consists entirely of exceptions.

Carey, Joyce

41.

To sit alone in the lamplight with a book spread out before you hold intimate converse with men of unseen generations -- such is pleasure beyond compare.

Kenko, Yoshida

42.

Books are men of higher stature; the only men that speak aloud for future times to hear.

Barrett, E.S.

43.

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

Erasmus, Desiderius

44.

I always begin at the left with the opening word of the sentence and read toward the right and I recommend this method.

Thurber, James

45.

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

Lee, Spike

46.

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

Shaw, George Bernard

47.

Early in the morning, at break of day, in all the freshness and dawn of one's strength, to read a book --I call that vicious!

Nietzsche, Friedrich

48.

Five daily newspapers arrive in my California driveway. The New York times and the Wall Street Journal are supplemented by three local papers. As for magazines, I read, or at least skim, Business Week, Forbes, The Economist, INC; Industry Week, Fortune. Other subscriptions include Sales and Marketing Management, Modern Health Care, Progressive Grocer, High Tech Business, and Slaon Management Review from MIT. I religiously read Business Tokyo, Asia Week, and Far Eastern Economic Review. I glance at Newsweek and Time ... but I devour the New Republic, Policy Review, Foreign Affairs, The Washington Monthly, and Public Interest. How about books? A dozen or more each month.

Peters, Thomas J.

49.

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

Whitman, Walt

50.

I am a part of everything that I have read.

Kieran, John