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

Reading furnishes the mind only with material for knowledge; it is thinking that makes what we read ours.

Locke, John

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

Schopenhauer, Arthur

Hypocrite reader -- my fellow -- my brother!

Baudelaire, Charles

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

Ruskin, John

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

The unread story is not a story; it is little black marks on wood pulp. The reader, reading it, makes it live: a live thing, a story.

Guin, Ursula K. Le

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

Murray, William

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

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

10.

With one day's reading a man may have the key in his hands.

Pound, Ezra

11.

A bad book is the worse that it cannot repent. It has not been the devil's policy to keep the masses of mankind in ignorance; but finding that they will read, he is doing all in his power to poison their books.

Kirk, E.N.

12.

Books and marriage go ill together.

Moliere

13.

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

14.

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

Johnson, Samuel

15.

No matter how busy you may think you are, you must find time for reading, or surrender yourself to self-chosen ignorance.

Townsend, Atwood H.

16.

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

17.

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

18.

It is books that teach us to refine our pleasures when young, and to recall them with satisfaction when we are old.

Hunt, Leigh

19.

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

Leacock, Stephen B.

20.

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

Parker, Dorothy

21.

We should be as careful of the books we read, as of the company we keep. The dead very often have more power than the living.

Edwards, Tryon

22.

I am not a speed reader. I am a speed understander.

Asimov, Isaac

23.

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

Bulwer-Lytton, Edward G.

24.

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.

25.

There is no robber worse than a bad book.

Proverb, Italian

26.

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

Lichtenberg, Georg C.

27.

The book to read is not the one which thinks for you, but the one which makes you think. No book in the world equals the Bible for that.

Mccosh

28.

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.

29.

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

30.

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

Barstow, Stan

31.

Surviving and thriving as a professional today demands two new approaches to the written word. First, it requires a new approach to orchestrating information, by skillfully choosing what to read and what to ignore. Second, it requires a new approach to integrating information, by reading faster and with greater comprehension.

Calano, Jimmy

32.

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

33.

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

Rohn, Jim

34.

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

Camus, Albert

35.

Any book that helps a child to form a habit of reading, to make reading one of his deep and continuing needs, is good for him.

McKenna, Richard

36.

One half who graduate from college never read another book.

True, Herbert

37.

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

Wesley, John

38.

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.

39.

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

40.

It is from books that wise people derive consolation in the troubles of life.

Hugo, Victor

41.

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

42.

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

43.

Beware of the person of one book.

Aquinas, St. Thomas

44.

Prerequisite for rereadability in books: that they be forgettable.

Rostand, Jean

45.

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

Barrett, E.S.

46.

A wicked book cannot repent.

Proverb

47.

There are books so alive that you're always afraid that while you weren't reading, the book has gone and changed, has shifted like a river; while you went on living, it went on living too, and like a river moved on and moved away. No one has stepped twice into the same river. But did anyone ever step twice into the same book?

Tsvetaeva, Marina

48.

Fiction reveals truth that reality obscures.

West, Jessamyn

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.

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

Brookner, Anita