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

Does there, I wonder, exist a being who has read all, or approximately all, that the person of average culture is supposed to have read, and that not to have read is a social sin? If such a being does exist, surely he is an old, a very old man.

Bennett, Arnold

Footnotes are the finer-suckered surfaces that allow testicular paragraphs to hold fast to the wider reality of the library.

Baker, Nicholson

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

Maugham, W. Somerset

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

Wycherley, William

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

When we read a story, we inhabit it. The covers of the book are like a roof and four walls. What is to happen next will take place within the four walls of the story. And this is possible because the story's voice makes everything its own.

Berger, John

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

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

Gibbon, Edward

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

10.

A wicked book cannot repent.

Proverb

11.

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

Twain, Mark

12.

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

13.

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

Maclennan, Hugh

14.

There is no such thing as a moral book or an immoral book. Books are well written or badly written. That is all.

Wilde, Oscar

15.

Reading makes immigrants of us all. It takes us away from home, but more important, it finds homes for us everywhere.

Rochman, Hazel

16.

The man who does not read books has no advantage over the man that can not read them.

Twain, Mark

17.

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

Brookner, Anita

18.

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

Dawkins, John

19.

The books one reads in childhood, and perhaps most of all the bad and good bad books, create in one's mind a sort of false map of the world, a series of fabulous countries into which one can retreat at odd moments throughout the rest of life, and which in some cases can survive a visit to the real countries which they are supposed to represent.

Orwell, George

20.

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

21.

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

22.

Only a generation of readers will span a generation of writers.

Spielberg, Steven

23.

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

Hood, Thomas

24.

As writers become more numerous, it is natural for readers to become more indolent; whence must necessarily arise a desire of attaining knowledge with the greatest possible ease.

Goldsmith, Oliver

25.

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

Erasmus, Desiderius

26.

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

Howells, William Dean

27.

What is a diary as a rule? A document useful to the person who keeps it. Dull to the contemporary who reads it and invaluable to the student, centuries afterwards, who treasures it.

Terry, Helen

28.

One half who graduate from college never read another book.

True, Herbert

29.

Everything in the world exists to end up in a book.

Mallarme, Stephane

30.

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

31.

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

32.

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

Rohn, Jim

33.

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

Hugo, Victor

34.

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

35.

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

Coolio

36.

From the moment I picked your book up until I laid it down I was convulsed with laughter. Some day I intend reading it.

Marx, Groucho

37.

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.

38.

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

39.

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

Colton, Charles Caleb

40.

Books are the blessed chloroform of the mind.

Chambers, Robert

41.

I am a part of everything that I have read.

Kieran, John

42.

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

43.

Most books today seemed to have been written overnight from books read the day before.

Chamfort, Sebastien-Roch Nicolas De

44.

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

Montagu, Lady Mary Wortley

45.

Books are lighthouses erected in the great sea of time.

Whipple, Edwin P.

46.

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

47.

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

48.

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

Lichtenberg, Georg C.

49.

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

Mansfield, Katherine

50.

A multitude of books distracts the mind.

Socrates