Motivational Quotes

Books - reading

Who ever converses among old books will be hard to please among the new.

- Temple, Sir William

Best Quotes about Books - reading

Books are divided into two classes, the books of the hour and the books of all time.

Ruskin, John

A novel points out that the world consists entirely of exceptions.

Carey, Joyce

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

Dane, Frank

Nine-tenths of the existing books are nonsense and the clever books are the refutation of that nonsense.

Disraeli, Benjamin

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

Milton, John

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

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

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.

The book you don't read won't help.

Rohn, Jim

10.

The tools I need for my work are paper, tobacco, food, and a little whiskey.

Faulkner, William

11.

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

Johnson, Samuel

12.

The reading of all good books is like a conversation with all the finest men of past centuries.

Descartes, Rene

13.

I divide all readers into two classes: those who read to remember and those who read to forget.

Phelps, William Lyon

14.

The last thing one discovers in composing a work is what to put first.

Pascal, Blaise

15.

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

16.

Books are lighthouses erected in the great sea of time.

Whipple, Edwin P.

17.

A person of mature years and ripe development, who is expecting nothing from literature but the corroboration and renewal of past ideas, may find satisfaction in a lucidity so complete as to occasion no imaginative excitement, but young and ambitious students are not content with it. They seek the excitement because they are capable of the growth that it accompanies.

Cooley, Charles Horton

18.

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

19.

Read, read, read. Read everything-- trash, classics, good and bad, and see how they do it. Just like a carpenter who works as an apprentice and studies the master. Read! You'll absorb it. Then write. If it is good, you'll find out. If it's not, throw it out the window.

Faulkner, William

20.

Beware of the person of one book.

Aquinas, St. Thomas

21.

What is reading, but silent conversation.

Landor, Walter Savage

22.

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

Mansfield, Katherine

23.

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

24.

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.

25.

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

Pound, Ezra

26.

I feel like I'm drowning. Every night, I'm carrying home loads of things to read but I'm too exhausted. I keep clipping things and Xeroxing them and planning to read them eventually, but I just end up throwing it all away and feeling guilty.

Levine, Ghita

27.

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

28.

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

Chesterton, Gilbert K.

29.

What is important is not to be able to read rapidly, but to be able to decide what not to read.

Mccay, James T.

30.

Who ever converses among old books will be hard to please among the new.

Temple, Sir William

31.

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

Belloc, Hilaire

32.

Some books leave us free and some books make us free.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

33.

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

34.

Books, like friends, should be few and well chosen. Like friends, too, we should return to them again and again for, like true friends, they will never fail us -- never cease to instruct -- never cloy.

Colton, Charles Caleb

35.

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

Leacock, Stephen B.

36.

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

Tupper, Martin

37.

Books to judicious compilers, are useful; to particular arts and professions, they are absolutely necessary; to men of real science, they are tools: but more are tools to them.

Johnson

38.

I read the newspaper avidly. It is my one form of continuous fiction.

Bevan, Aneurin

39.

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

40.

'Tis pleasant, sure, to see one's name in print; A book's a book, although there's nothing in it.

Byron, Lord

41.

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

42.

Old books that have ceased to be of service should no more be abandoned than should old friends who have ceased to give pleasure.

Worsthorne, Sir Peregrine

43.

A person who publishes a book appears willfully in public with his pants down.

Millay, Edna St. Vincent

44.

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

Butler, Samuel

45.

Books are not men and yet they stay alive.

Benet, Stephen Vincent

46.

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

47.

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

48.

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

49.

No furniture is so charming as books.

Smith, Sydney

50.

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