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

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

Forster, Edward M.

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

Shaw, George Bernard

Americans will listen, but they do not care to read. War and Peace must wait for the leisure of retirement, which never really comes: meanwhile it helps to furnish the living room. Blockbusting fiction is bought as furniture. Unread, it maintains its value. Read, it looks like money wasted. Cunningly, Americans know that books contain a person, and they want the person, not the book.

Burgess, Anthony

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

Erasmus, Desiderius

Books are standing counselors and preachers, always at hand, and always disinterested; having this advantage over oral instructors, that they are ready to repeat their lesson as often as we please.

Chambers, Oswald

Books are those faithful mirrors that reflect to our mind the minds of sages and heroes.

Gibbon, Edward

Books are the bees which carry the quickening pollen from one to another mind.

Lowell, James Russell

What is reading, but silent conversation.

Landor, Walter Savage

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

10.

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

11.

All good books are alike in that they are truer than if they had really happened and after you are finished reading one you will feel that all that happened to you and afterwards it all belongs to you; the good and the bad, the ecstasy, the remorse, and sorrow, the people and the places and how the weather was.

Hemingway, Ernest

12.

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

Gibbon, Edward

13.

A book worth reading is worth buying.

Ruskin, John

14.

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

15.

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

Hope, Anthony

16.

Those who do not read are no better off than those who cannot read.

17.

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

Chesterton, Gilbert K.

18.

A good book is the very essence of a good man. His virtues survive in it, while the foibles and faults of his actual life are forgotten. All the goodly company of the excellent and great sit around my table, or look down on me from yonder shelves, waiting patiently to answer my questions and enrich me with their wisdom. A precious book is a foretaste of immortality.

Cuyler, Theodore L.

19.

Old books, you know well, are books of the world's youth, and new books are the fruits of its age.

Holmes, Oliver Wendell

20.

Hypocrite reader -- my fellow -- my brother!

Baudelaire, Charles

21.

My books are water; those of the great geniuses are wine -- everybody drinks water.

Twain, Mark

22.

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

Lichtenberg, Georg C.

23.

Thy books should, like thy friends, not many be, yet such wherein men may thy judgment see.

Wycherley, William

24.

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

Barrett, E.S.

25.

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

Parker, Dorothy

26.

When I am dead, I hope it may be said: His sins were scarlet, but his books were read.

Belloc, Hilaire

27.

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.

28.

A real book is not one that we read, but one that reads us.

Auden, W. H.

29.

A novel is a mirror carried along a main road.

Stendhal, Henri B.

30.

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

31.

Miss a meal if you have to, but don't miss a book.

Rohn, Jim

32.

A great book should leave you with many experiences and slightly exhausted at the end. You should live several lives while reading it.

Styron, William

33.

Readers are plentiful: thinkers are rare.

Martineau, Harriet

34.

Fiction reveals truth that reality obscures.

West, Jessamyn

35.

Beware you be not swallowed up in books! An ounce of love is worth a pound of knowledge.

Wesley, John

36.

Books are masters who instruct us without rods or ferules, without words or anger, without bread or money. If you approach them, they are not asleep; if you seek them, they do not hide; if you blunder, they do not scold; if you are ignorant, they do not laugh at you.

Bury, Richard De

37.

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

38.

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

Secondat, Charles de

39.

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

Howells, William Dean

40.

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

Blackie, Professor

41.

I always like to look on the optimistic side of life, but I am realistic enough to know that life is a complex matter.

Disney, Walt

42.

I know every book of mine by its smell, and I have but to put my nose between the pages to be reminded of all sorts of things.

Gissing, George Robert

43.

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

44.

Read Homer once, and you can read no more. For all books else appear so mean, and so poor. Verse will seem prose; but still persist to read, and Homer will be all the books you need.

Buckingham, Duke of

45.

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

46.

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

Carlyle, Thomas

47.

Read good, big important things.

Noonan, Peggy

48.

The flood of print has turned reading into a process of gulping rather than savoring

Chappell, Warren

49.

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