Motivational Quotes

Books - reading

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

Best Quotes about Books - reading

The age of the book is almost gone.

Steiner, George

The books we think we ought to read are poky, dull, and dry; The books that we would like to read we are ashamed to buy; The books that people talk about we never can recall; And the books that people give us, oh, they're the worst of all.

Wells, Carolyn

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

Butler, Samuel

No story is the same to us after a lapse of time; or rather we who read it are no longer the same interpreters.

Eliot, George

The best effect of any book, is that it excites the reader to self-activity.

Carlyle, Thomas

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

Ruskin, John

Much reading is an oppression of the mind, and extinguishes the natural candle, which is the reason of so many senseless scholars in the world.

Penn, William

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.

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

Johnson, Samuel

10.

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

Bevan, Aneurin

11.

Thank you for sending me a copy of your book -- I'll waste no time reading it.

Hadas, Moses

12.

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

Chesterton, Gilbert K.

13.

What is reading, but silent conversation.

Landor, Walter Savage

14.

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

15.

The books that the world calls immoral are the books that show the world its own shame.

Wilde, Oscar

16.

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

17.

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

Coolio

18.

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

19.

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

20.

A novel is a mirror carried along a main road.

Stendhal, Henri B.

21.

The chief knowledge that a man gets from reading books is the knowledge that very few of them are worth reading.

Mencken, H. L.

22.

A vacuum of ideas affects people differently than a vacuum of air, otherwise readers of books would be constantly collapsing.

Lichtenberg, Georg C.

23.

The unread story is not a story; it is little black marks on wood pulp. The reader, reading it, makes it live: a live thing, a story.

Guin, Ursula K. Le

24.

There are worse crimes than burning books. One of them is not reading them.

Brodsky, Joseph

25.

Beware of the person of one book.

Aquinas, St. Thomas

26.

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

27.

Every abridgement of a good book is a fool abridged.

Montaigne, Michel Eyquem De

28.

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

29.

A good title is the title of a successful book.

Chandler, Raymond

30.

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

Wycherley, William

31.

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

32.

Happy is he who has laid up in his youth, and held fast in all fortune, a genuine and passionate love for reading.

Choate, Rufus

33.

In science read the newest works, in literature read the oldest.

Bulwer-Lytton, Edward G.

34.

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

Faulkner, William

35.

Until I feared I would lose it, I never loved to read. One does not love breathing.

Lee, Harper

36.

Begin to read a book that will help you move toward your dream.

Brown, Les

37.

Books and marriage go ill together.

Moliere

38.

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

Parker, Dorothy

39.

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

Porter, Noah

40.

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

Descartes, Rene

41.

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

Dane, Frank

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.

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

Gibbon, Edward

44.

Books are not men and yet they stay alive.

Benet, Stephen Vincent

45.

To learn to read is to light a fire; every syllable that is spelled out is a spark.

Hugo, Victor

46.

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

Mcluhan, Marshall

47.

A conventional good read is usually a bad read, a relaxing bath in what we know already. A true good read is surely an act of innovative creation in which we, the readers, become conspirators.

Bradbury, Malcolm

48.

Old books, you know well, are books of the world's youth, and new books are the fruits of its age.

Holmes, Oliver Wendell

49.

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

Tupper, Martin

50.

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