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

What we become depends on what we read after all the professors have finished with us. The greatest university of all is the collection of books.

Carlyle, Thomas

The world of books is the most remarkable creation of man nothing else that he builds ever lasts monuments fall; nations perish; civilization grow old and die out; new races build others. But in the world of books are volumes that have seen this happen again and again and yet live on. Still young, still as fresh as the day they were written, still telling men's hearts, of the hearts of men centuries dead.

Day, Clarence

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

Locke, John

A book that is shut is but a block.

Fuller, Thomas

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

There are two kinds of books. Those that no one reads and those that no one ought to read.

Mencken, H. L.

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

Leacock, Stephen B.

Americans will listen, but they do not care to read. War and Peace must wait for the leisure of retirement, which never really comes: meanwhile it helps to furnish the living room. Blockbusting fiction is bought as furniture. Unread, it maintains its value. Read, it looks like money wasted. Cunningly, Americans know that books contain a person, and they want the person, not the book.

Burgess, Anthony

There was a time when the world acted on books; now books act on the world.

Joubert, Joseph

10.

The most foolish kind of a book is a kind of leaky boat on the sea of wisdom; some of the wisdom will get in anyhow.

Holmes, Oliver Wendell

11.

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

12.

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

13.

Everything in this book may be wrong. [The Savior's Manual]

Bach, Richard

14.

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

15.

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

Harington, John

16.

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

17.

There is creative reading as well as creative writing.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

18.

Prerequisite for rereadability in books: that they be forgettable.

Rostand, Jean

19.

Fiction reveals truth that reality obscures.

West, Jessamyn

20.

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

Phelps, William Lyon

21.

The age of the book is almost gone.

Steiner, George

22.

No man understands a deep book until he has seen and lived at least part of its contents.

Pound, Ezra

23.

Beware of the person of one book.

Aquinas, St. Thomas

24.

One always tends to overpraise a long book, because one has got through it.

Forster, Edward M.

25.

After all manner of professors have done their best for us, the place we are to get knowledge is in books. The true university of these days is a collection of books.

Carlyle, Thomas

26.

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

27.

To read too many books is harmful.

Zedong, Mao

28.

A book is like a man -- clever and dull, brave and cowardly, beautiful and ugly. For every flowering thought there will be a page like a wet and mangy mongrel, and for every looping flight a tap on the wing and a reminder that wax cannot hold the feathers firm too near the sun.

Steinbeck, John

29.

The more sins you confess, the more books you will sell.

Proverb, American

30.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

31.

A wicked book cannot repent.

Proverb

32.

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.

33.

I wish I could write a beautiful book to break those hearts that are soon to cease to exist: a book of faith and small neat worlds and of people who live by the philosophies of popular songs.

34.

Books are standing counselors and preachers, always at hand, and always disinterested; having this advantage over oral instructors, that they are ready to repeat their lesson as often as we please.

Chambers, Oswald

35.

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

36.

In the case of good books, the point is not how many of them you can get through, but rather how many can get through to you.

Adler, Mortimer J.

37.

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

Barrett, E.S.

38.

The constant habit of perusing devout books is so indispensable, that it has been termed the oil of the lamp of prayer. Too much reading, however, and too little meditation, may produce the effect of a lamp inverted; which is extinguished by the very excess of that ailment, whose property is to feed it.

More, Hannah

39.

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

40.

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

41.

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

Ruskin, John

42.

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

Mallarme, Stephane

43.

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

Johnson, Samuel

44.

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

Gibbon, Edward

45.

I love to lose myself in other men's minds. When I am not walking, I am reading. I cannot sit and think; books think for me.

Lamb, Charles

46.

The only books that influence us are those for which we are ready, and which have gone a little farther down our particular path than we have yet got ourselves.

Forster, Edward M.

47.

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

Chamfort, Sebastien-Roch Nicolas De

48.

All the best stories in the world are but one story in reality -- the story of escape. It is the only thing which interests us all and at all times, how to escape.

Benson, Arthur Christopher

49.

A novel is a mirror carried along a main road.

Stendhal, Henri B.

50.

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

Maclennan, Hugh