Motivational Quotes

Books - reading

How many a man has dated a new era in his life from the reading of a book! The book exists for us, perchance, that will explain our miracles and reveal new ones. The at present unutterable things we may find somewhere uttered.

- Thoreau, Henry David

Best Quotes about Books - reading

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

The reason that fiction is more interesting than any other form of literature, to those who really like to study people, is that in fiction the author can really tell the truth without humiliating himself.

Roosevelt, Eleanor

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

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

Pound, Ezra

All my good reading, you might say, was done in the toilet. There are passages in Ulysses which can be read only in the toilet -- if one wants to extract the full flavor of their content.

Miller, Henry

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

You can either read something many times in order to be assured that you got it all, or else you can define your purpose and use techniques which will assure that you have met it and gotten what you need.

Kump, Peter

Once we have learned to read, meaning of words can somehow register without consciousness.

Marcel, Anthony

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

Wycherley, William

10.

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.

11.

Hypocrite reader -- my fellow -- my brother!

Baudelaire, Charles

12.

One sheds one's sicknesses in books -- repeats and presents again one's emotions, to be master of them.

Lawrence, D. H.

13.

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

14.

There is creative reading as well as creative writing.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

15.

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

Chesterton, Gilbert K.

16.

What is the most precious, the most exciting smell awaiting you in the house when you return to it after a dozen years or so? The smell of roses, you think? No, moldering books.

Sinyavsky, Andre

17.

To feel most beautifully alive means to be reading something beautiful, ready always to apprehend in the flow of language the sudden flash of poetry.

Bachelard, Gaston

18.

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

19.

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

Mansfield, Katherine

20.

I always begin at the left with the opening word of the sentence and read toward the right and I recommend this method.

Thurber, James

21.

There are people who read too much: bibliobibuli. I know some who are constantly drunk on books, as other men are drunk on whiskey or religion. They wander through this most diverting and stimulating of worlds in a haze, seeing nothing and hearing nothing.

Mencken, H. L.

22.

He had read much, if one considers his long life; but his contemplation was much more than his reading. He was wont to say that if he had read as much as other men he should have known no more than other men.

Aubrey, John

23.

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

Faulkner, William

24.

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

25.

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

Harington, John

26.

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

Belloc, Hilaire

27.

A house without books is like a room without windows. No man has a right to bring up his children without surrounding them with books, if he has the means to buy them. It is a wrong to his family. Children learn to read by being in the presence of books. The love of knowledge comes with reading and grows upon it. And the love of knowledge, in a young mind, is almost always a warrant against the inferior excitement of passions and vices.

Mann, Horace

28.

A wicked book cannot repent.

Proverb

29.

A bad book is as much of a labor to write as a good one; it comes as sincerely from the author's soul.

Huxley, Aldous

30.

In science, read by preference the newest works. In literature, read the oldest. The classics are always modern.

Lytton, Lord Edward

31.

Some of the most famous books are the least worth reading. Their fame was due to their having done something that needed to be doing in their day. The work is done and the virtue of the book has expired.

Morely, John

32.

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

Ruskin, John

33.

The novel can't compete with cars, the movies, television, and liquor. A guy who's had a good feed and tanked up on good wine gives his old lady a kiss after supper and his day is over. Finished.

Celine, Louis-Ferdinand

34.

Of all the ways of acquiring books, writing them oneself is regarded as the most praiseworthy method. Writers are really people who write books not because they are poor, but because they are dissatisfied with the books which they could buy but do not like.

Benjamin, Walter

35.

No furniture is so charming as books.

Smith, Sydney

36.

The books one has written in the past have two surprises in store: one couldn't write them again, and wouldn't want to.

Rostand, Jean

37.

Reading is equivalent to thinking with someone else's head instead of with one's own.

Schopenhauer, Arthur

38.

The reading or non-reading a book will never keep down a single petticoat.

Byron, Lord

39.

Early in the morning, at break of day, in all the freshness and dawn of one's strength, to read a book --I call that vicious!

Nietzsche, Friedrich

40.

I don't think any good book is based on factual experience. Bad books are about things the writer already knew before he wrote them.

Fuentes, Carlos

41.

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

Twain, Mark

42.

Beware of the person of one book.

Aquinas, St. Thomas

43.

Ideally a book would have no order to it, and the reader would have to discover his own.

Vaneigem, Raoul

44.

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

Bach, Richard

45.

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

Colton, Charles Caleb

46.

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

Parker, Dorothy

47.

What is reading, but silent conversation.

Landor, Walter Savage

48.

One half who graduate from college never read another book.

True, Herbert

49.

In the dark colony of night, when I consider man's magnificent capacity for malice, madness, folly, envy, rage, and destructiveness, and I wonder whether we shall not end up as breakfast for newts and polyps, I seem to hear the muffled cries of all the words in all the books with covers closed.

Rosten, Leo

50.

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

Phelps, William Lyon