Motivational Quotes

Books - reading

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

Best Quotes about Books - reading

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

Secondat, Charles de

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

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

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

Gibbon, Edward

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

What gunpowder did for war the printing press has done for the mind.

Phillips, Wendell

Books in a large university library system: 2, 000,000. Books in an average large city library: 1 0,000. Average number of books in a chain bookstore: 30, 000. Books in an average neighborhood branch library: 20, 000.

Horowitz, Lois

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

Brookner, Anita

If a secret history of books could be written, and the author's private thoughts and meanings noted down alongside of his story, how many insipid volumes would become interesting, and dull tales excite the reader!

Thackeray, William M.

10.

If I had my way books would not be written in English, but in an exceedingly difficult secret language that only skilled professional readers and story-tellers could interpret. Then people like you would have to go to public halls and pay good prices to hear the professionals decode and read the books aloud for you. This plan would have the advantage of scaring off all amateur authors, retired politicians, country doctors and I-Married-a-Midget writers who would not have the patience to learn the secret language.

Davies, Robertson

11.

Today a reader, tomorrow a leader.

Fusselman, W.

12.

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

Pascal, Blaise

13.

The flood of print has turned reading into a process of gulping rather than savoring

Chappell, Warren

14.

A book is a part of life, a manifestation of life, just as much as a tree or a horse or a star. It obeys its own rhythms, its own laws, whether it be a novel, a play, or a diary. The deep, hidden rhythm of life is always there -- that of the pulse, the heart beat.

Miller, Henry

15.

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

16.

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

Channing, William Ellery

17.

A book may be compared to your neighbor: if it be good, it cannot last too long; if bad, you cannot get rid of it too early.

Brooke, Rupert

18.

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

19.

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

20.

All the known world, excepting only savage nations, is governed by books.

Voltaire

21.

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.

22.

There is a set of religious, or rather moral, writings which teach that virtue is the certain road to happiness, and vice to misery in this world. A very wholesome and comfortable doctrine, and to which we have but one objection, namely, that it is not true.

Fielding, Henry

23.

A novel is a mirror carried along a main road.

Stendhal, Henri B.

24.

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

25.

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

Bevan, Aneurin

26.

No furniture is so charming as books.

Smith, Sydney

27.

People are much more willing to lend you books than bookcases.

Twain, Mark

28.

Books are but waste paper unless we spend in action the wisdom we get from thought -- asleep. When we are weary of the living, we may repair to the dead, who have nothing of peevishness, pride, or design in their conversation.

Collier, Jeremy

29.

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

30.

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.

31.

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

Dane, Frank

32.

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

33.

A successful book cannot afford to be more than ten percent new.

Mcluhan, Marshall

34.

Read Homer once, and you can read no more. For all books else appear so mean, and so poor. Verse will seem prose; but still persist to read, and Homer will be all the books you need.

Buckingham, Duke of

35.

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.

36.

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

Johnson, Samuel

37.

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

38.

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

39.

Until it is kindled by a spirit as flamingly alive as the one which gave it birth a book is dead to us. Words divested of their magic are but dead hieroglyphs.

Miller, Henry

40.

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

Howells, William Dean

41.

A bibliophile of little means is likely to suffer often. Books don't slip from his hands but fly past him through the air, high as birds, high as prices.

Neruda, Pablo

42.

There is more treasure in books than in all the pirates loot on Treasure Island and best of all, you can enjoy these riches every day of your life.

Disney, Walt

43.

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

44.

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

Mccay, James T.

45.

Reading is to the mind what exercise is to the body. It is wholesome and bracing for the mind to have its faculties kept on the stretch.

Steele, Sir Richard

46.

Everywhere I have sought rest and not found it, except sitting in a corner by myself with a little book.

Kempis, Thomas

47.

A book that is shut is but a block.

Fuller, Thomas

48.

No one can read with profit that which he cannot learn to read with pleasure.

Porter, Noah

49.

Readers are less and less seen as mere non-writers, the subhuman other or flawed derivative of the author; the lack of a pen is no longer a shameful mark of secondary status but a positively enabling space, just as within every writer can be seen to lurk, as a repressed but contaminating antithesis, a reader.

Eagleton, Terry

50.

A multitude of books distracts the mind.

Socrates