Motivational Quotes

Books - reading

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

Best Quotes about Books - reading

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

Johnson, Samuel

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

Mcluhan, Marshall

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

This is not a book. This is libel, slander, defamation of character. This is not a book, in the ordinary sense of the word. No, this is a prolonged insult, a gob of spit in the face of Art, a kick in the pants to God, Man, Destiny, Time, Love, Beauty... what you will. I am going to sing for you, a little off key perhaps, but I will sing.

Miller, Henry

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

Harington, John

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

Butler, Samuel

I feel a kind of reverence for the first books of young authors. There is so much aspiration in them, so much audacious hope and trembling fear, so much of the heart's history, that all errors and shortcomings are for a while lost sight of in the amiable self assertion of youth.

Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth

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

Parker, Dorothy

You should read books like you take medicine, by advice, and not by advertisement.

Ruskin, John

10.

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

Carlyle, Thomas

11.

The newest books are those that never grow old.

Jackson, George Holbrook

12.

Next to acquiring good friends, the best acquisition is that of good books.

Colton, Charles Caleb

13.

Who kills a man kills a reasonable creature, God's image, but thee who destroys a good book, kills reason itself.

Milton, John

14.

Beware of the person of one book.

Aquinas, St. Thomas

15.

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

16.

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

17.

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

Jackson, Holbrook

18.

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

19.

A house without books is like a room without windows. No man has a right to bring up his children without surrounding them with books, if he has the means to buy them. It is a wrong to his family. Children learn to read by being in the presence of books. The love of knowledge comes with reading and grows upon it. And the love of knowledge, in a young mind, is almost always a warrant against the inferior excitement of passions and vices.

Mann, Horace

20.

Books in a large university library system: 2, 000,000. Books in an average large city library: 1 0,000. Average number of books in a chain bookstore: 30, 000. Books in an average neighborhood branch library: 20, 000.

Horowitz, Lois

21.

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

22.

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

23.

Reading the Scriptures is an uplifting experience.

24.

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

25.

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.

26.

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

Auden, W. H.

27.

A book that is shut is but a block.

Fuller, Thomas

28.

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.

29.

Once we have learned to read, meaning of words can somehow register without consciousness.

Marcel, Anthony

30.

The great American novel has not only already been written, it has already been rejected.

Dane, Frank

31.

The worst readers are those who behave like plundering troops: they take away a few things they can use, dirty and confound the remainder, and revile the whole.

Nietzsche, Friedrich

32.

What gunpowder did for war the printing press has done for the mind.

Phillips, Wendell

33.

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

34.

Readers are less and less seen as mere non-writers, the subhuman other or flawed derivative of the author; the lack of a pen is no longer a shameful mark of secondary status but a positively enabling space, just as within every writer can be seen to lurk, as a repressed but contaminating antithesis, a reader.

Eagleton, Terry

35.

I heard his library burned down and both books were destroyed -- and one of them hadn't even been colored in yet.

Dawkins, John

36.

Reading a book is like re-writing it for yourself. You bring to a novel, anything you read, all your experience of the world. You bring your history and you read it in your own terms.

Carter, Angela

37.

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.

38.

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

39.

A dose of poison can do its work but once. A bad book can go on poisoning minds for generations.

Murray, William

40.

The printing press is either the greatest blessing or the greatest curse of modern times, sometimes one forgets which it is.

Barrie, Sir James M.

41.

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

Channing, William Ellery

42.

Ideally a book would have no order to it, and the reader would have to discover his own.

Vaneigem, Raoul

43.

You will, I am sure, agree with me that... if page 534 only finds us in the second chapter, the length of the first one must have been really intolerable.

Doyle, Sir Arthur Conan

44.

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

45.

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

46.

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

47.

There are people who read too much: bibliobibuli. I know some who are constantly drunk on books, as other men are drunk on whiskey or religion. They wander through this most diverting and stimulating of worlds in a haze, seeing nothing and hearing nothing.

Mencken, H. L.

48.

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

49.

Books are lighthouses erected in the great sea of time.

Whipple, Edwin P.

50.

Books succeed, and lives fail.

Browning, Elizabeth Barrett