Motivational Quotes

Books - reading

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

Best Quotes about Books - reading

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

Forster, Edward M.

The reading of all good books is like a conversation with all the finest men of past centuries.

Descartes, Rene

The novel can't compete with cars, the movies, television, and liquor. A guy who's had a good feed and tanked up on good wine gives his old lady a kiss after supper and his day is over. Finished.

Celine, Louis-Ferdinand

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

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

Voltaire

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

Wilde, Oscar

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

Sandwell, B. K.

Readers are plentiful: thinkers are rare.

Martineau, Harriet

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

10.

When you have mastered numbers, you will in fact no longer be reading numbers, any more than you read words when reading books You will be reading meanings.

Geneen, Harold S.

11.

The classics are only primitive literature. They belong to the same class as primitive machinery and primitive music and primitive medicine.

Leacock, Stephen B.

12.

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

Johnson, Samuel

13.

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

Brookner, Anita

14.

The Brahmins say that in their books there are many predictions of times in which it will rain. But press those books as strongly as you can, you can not get out of them a drop of water. So you can not get out of all the books that contain the best precepts the smallest good deed.

Tolstoy, Count Leo

15.

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

Byron, Lord

16.

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

17.

To read well, that is, to read true books in a true spirit, is a noble exercise, and one that will task the reader more than any other exercise which the customs of the day esteem. It requires a training such as the athletes underwent, the steady intention almost of the whole life to this object.

Thoreau, Henry David

18.

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

19.

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

Carey, Joyce

20.

The mortality of all inanimate things is terrible to me, but that of books most of all.

Howells, William Dean

21.

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

Critchfield, Jim

22.

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

Brodsky, Joseph

23.

Books succeed, and lives fail.

Browning, Elizabeth Barrett

24.

In science read the newest works, in literature read the oldest.

Bulwer-Lytton, Edward G.

25.

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

26.

We ought to reverence books; to look on them as useful and mighty things. If they are good and true, whether they are about religion, politics, farming, trade, law, or medicine, they are the message of Christ, the maker of all things -- the teacher of all truth.

Kingsley, Charles

27.

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

28.

Some books leave us free and some books make us free.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

29.

No entertainment is so cheap as reading, nor is any pleasure so lasting.

Montagu, Lady Mary Wortley

30.

A vacuum of ideas affects people differently than a vacuum of air, otherwise readers of books would be constantly collapsing.

Lichtenberg, Georg C.

31.

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.

32.

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

Lichtenberg, Georg C.

33.

Don't just read the easy stuff. You may be entertained by it, but you will never grow from it.

Rohn, Jim

34.

The newest books are those that never grow old.

Jackson, George Holbrook

35.

Everywhere I have sought rest and not found it, except sitting in a corner by myself with a little book.

Kempis, Thomas

36.

I would sooner read a timetable or a catalog than nothing at all.

Maugham, W. Somerset

37.

Beware of the person of one book.

Aquinas, St. Thomas

38.

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

39.

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

Secondat, Charles de

40.

Reading is a basic tool in the living of a good life.

Adler, Mortimer J.

41.

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

Luther, Martin

42.

Books are the blessed chloroform of the mind.

Chambers, Robert

43.

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

44.

A bibliophile of little means is likely to suffer often. Books don't slip from his hands but fly past him through the air, high as birds, high as prices.

Neruda, Pablo

45.

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

Byron, Lord

46.

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

Mcluhan, Marshall

47.

A book might be written on the injustice of the just.

Hope, Anthony

48.

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

49.

Do we write books so that they shall merely be read? Don't we also write them for employment in the household? For one that is read from start to finish, thousands are leafed through, other thousands lie motionless, others are jammed against mouseholes, thrown at rats, others are stood on, sat on, drummed on, have gingerbread baked on them or are used to light pipes.

Lichtenberg, Georg C.

50.

After all, the world is not a stage -- not to me: nor a theatre: nor a show-house of any sort. And art, especially novels, are not little theatres where the reader sits aloft and watches... and sighs, commiserates, condones and smiles. That's what you want a book to be: because it leaves you so safe and superior, with your two-dollar ticket to the show. And that's what my books are not and never will be. Whoever reads me will be in the thick of the scrimmage, and if he doesn't like it -- if he wants a safe seat in the audience -- let him read someone else.

Lawrence, D. H.