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

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

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

Hope, Anthony

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.

The successful Accelerated Reader is able to read larger than normal blocks or bites of the printed page with each eye stop. He has accepted, without reservation, the philosophy that the most important benefit of reading is the gaining of information, ideas, mental picture and entertainment-not the fretting over words. He has come to the realization that words in and of themselves are for the most part insignificant.

Cutler, Wade E.

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

Bach, Richard

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

Johnson, Samuel

Somewhere, everywhere, now hidden, now apparent in what ever is written down, is the form of a human being. If we seek to know him, are we idly occupied?

Woolf, Virginia

Books and marriage go ill together.

Moliere

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

Carlyle, Thomas

10.

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

Mansfield, Katherine

11.

Books, books, books had found the secret of a garret-room piled high with cases in my father's name; Piled high, packed large, --where, creeping in and out among the giant fossils of my past, like some small nimble mouse between the ribs of a mastodon, I nibbled here and there at this or that box, pulling through the gap, in heats of terror, haste, victorious joy, the first book first. And how I felt it beat under my pillow, in the morning's dark. An hour before the sun would let me read! My books!

Browning, Elizabeth Barrett

12.

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

13.

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

14.

Books had instant replay long before televised sports.

Williams, Bert

15.

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.

16.

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

17.

There is more treasure in books than in all the pirates loot on Treasure Island and best of all, you can enjoy these riches every day of your life.

Disney, Walt

18.

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

19.

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.

20.

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

21.

I wish I could write a beautiful book to break those hearts that are soon to cease to exist: a book of faith and small neat worlds and of people who live by the philosophies of popular songs.

22.

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

Disraeli, Benjamin

23.

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

24.

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

Lichtenberg, Georg C.

25.

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

Hadas, Moses

26.

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

27.

There is creative reading as well as creative writing.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

28.

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

Hood, Thomas

29.

Tradition is but a meteor, which, if it once falls, cannot be rekindled. Memory, once interrupted, is not to be recalled. But written learning is a fixed luminary, which, after the cloud that had hidden it has passed away, is again bright in its proper station. So books are faithful repositories, which may be awhile neglected or forgotten, but when opened again, will again impart instruction.

Johnson

30.

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

Schopenhauer, Arthur

31.

When the book comes out it may hurt you -- but in order for me to do it, it had to hurt me first. I can only tell you about yourself as much as I can face about myself.

Baldwin, James

32.

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

33.

Books are the blessed chloroform of the mind.

Chambers, Robert

34.

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

35.

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

Coolio

36.

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

37.

Read as you taste fruit or savor wine, or enjoy friendship, love or life.

Jackson, Holbrook

38.

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

Brookner, Anita

39.

To use books rightly, is to go to them for help; to appeal to them when our own knowledge and power fail; to be led by them into wider sight and purer conception than our own, and to receive from them the united sentence of the judges and councils of all time, against our solitary and unstable opinions.

Ruskin, John

40.

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

Secondat, Charles de

41.

Beware of the person of one book.

Aquinas, St. Thomas

42.

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

43.

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

Butler, Samuel

44.

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

Schopenhauer, Arthur

45.

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

Forster, Edward M.

46.

A novel must be exceptionally good to live as long as the average cat.

Maclennan, Hugh

47.

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

48.

The books we read should be chosen with great care, that they may be, as an Egyptian king wrote over his library, The medicines of the soul.

Hood, Paxton

49.

Book love... is your pass to the greatest, the purest, and the most perfect pleasure that God has prepared for His creatures.

Trollope, Anthony

50.

A big leather-bound volume makes an ideal razor strap. A thin book is useful to stick under a table with a broken caster to steady it. A large, flat atlas can be used to cover a window with a broken pane. And a thick, old-fashioned heavy book with a clasp is the finest thing in the world to throw at a noisy cat.

Twain, Mark