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

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

Reading the Scriptures is an uplifting experience.

To learn to read is to light a fire; every syllable that is spelled out is a spark.

Hugo, Victor

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

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

Blackie, Professor

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

When a book raises your spirit, and inspires you with noble and manly thoughts, seek for no other test of its excellence. It is good, and made by a good workman.

Bruyere, Jean De La

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

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

Whitman, Walt

10.

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

Dane, Frank

11.

A novel is a mirror carried along a main road.

Stendhal, Henri B.

12.

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

Ruskin, John

13.

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

Auden, W. H.

14.

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

15.

Books are lighthouses erected in the great sea of time.

Whipple, Edwin P.

16.

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

17.

In science, read by preference the newest works. In literature, read the oldest. The classics are always modern.

Lytton, Lord Edward

18.

We are too civil to books. For a few golden sentences we will turn over and actually read a volume of four or five hundred pages.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

19.

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

20.

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

Wilde, Oscar

21.

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

Holmes, Oliver Wendell

22.

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

Tupper, Martin

23.

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

Brodsky, Joseph

24.

The newest books are those that never grow old.

Jackson, George Holbrook

25.

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

26.

The books one has written in the past have two surprises in store: one couldn't write them again, and wouldn't want to.

Rostand, Jean

27.

A novel is never anything, but a philosophy put into images.

Camus, Albert

28.

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

Carlyle, Thomas

29.

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

30.

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

31.

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

32.

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

Colton, Charles Caleb

33.

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

Channing, William Ellery

34.

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

35.

Books succeed, and lives fail.

Browning, Elizabeth Barrett

36.

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

37.

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

Maugham, W. Somerset

38.

A good title is the title of a successful book.

Chandler, Raymond

39.

Read good, big important things.

Noonan, Peggy

40.

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

Lowell, James Russell

41.

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

42.

I am a part of everything that I have read.

Kieran, John

43.

A library is thought in cold storage.

Samuel, Herbert

44.

The world may be full of fourth-rate writers but it's also full of fourth-rate readers.

Barstow, Stan

45.

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

46.

The age of the book is almost gone.

Steiner, George

47.

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

Montagu, Lady Mary Wortley

48.

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

Secondat, Charles de

49.

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

50.

Readers are plentiful: thinkers are rare.

Martineau, Harriet