Motivational Quotes

Books - reading

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

Best Quotes about Books - reading

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

Books are not men and yet they stay alive.

Benet, Stephen Vincent

A novel is never anything, but a philosophy put into images.

Camus, Albert

One half who graduate from college never read another book.

True, Herbert

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

Leacock, Stephen B.

Does there, I wonder, exist a being who has read all, or approximately all, that the person of average culture is supposed to have read, and that not to have read is a social sin? If such a being does exist, surely he is an old, a very old man.

Bennett, Arnold

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

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

Schopenhauer, Arthur

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

Carlyle, Thomas

10.

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

Phelps, William Lyon

11.

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

12.

Prerequisite for rereadability in books: that they be forgettable.

Rostand, Jean

13.

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

Phillips, Wendell

14.

Five daily newspapers arrive in my California driveway. The New York times and the Wall Street Journal are supplemented by three local papers. As for magazines, I read, or at least skim, Business Week, Forbes, The Economist, INC; Industry Week, Fortune. Other subscriptions include Sales and Marketing Management, Modern Health Care, Progressive Grocer, High Tech Business, and Slaon Management Review from MIT. I religiously read Business Tokyo, Asia Week, and Far Eastern Economic Review. I glance at Newsweek and Time ... but I devour the New Republic, Policy Review, Foreign Affairs, The Washington Monthly, and Public Interest. How about books? A dozen or more each month.

Peters, Thomas J.

15.

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

Carey, Joyce

16.

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.

17.

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

Wilde, Oscar

18.

The reason a writer writes a book is to forget a book and the reason a reader reads one is to remember it.

Wolfe, Thomas

19.

The books one reads in childhood, and perhaps most of all the bad and good bad books, create in one's mind a sort of false map of the world, a series of fabulous countries into which one can retreat at odd moments throughout the rest of life, and which in some cases can survive a visit to the real countries which they are supposed to represent.

Orwell, George

20.

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

21.

This will never be a civilized country until we expend more money for books than we do for chewing gum.

Hubbard, Elbert

22.

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

Faulkner, William

23.

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

24.

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

25.

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

Bulwer-Lytton, Edward G.

26.

Every abridgement of a good book is a fool abridged.

Montaigne, Michel Eyquem De

27.

A book that is shut is but a block.

Fuller, Thomas

28.

Only a generation of readers will span a generation of writers.

Spielberg, Steven

29.

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

Joubert, Joseph

30.

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

31.

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

Brodsky, Joseph

32.

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

Porter, Noah

33.

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

34.

Do we write books so that they shall merely be read? Don't we also write them for employment in the household? For one that is read from start to finish, thousands are leafed through, other thousands lie motionless, others are jammed against mouseholes, thrown at rats, others are stood on, sat on, drummed on, have gingerbread baked on them or are used to light pipes.

Lichtenberg, Georg C.

35.

Miss a meal if you have to, but don't miss a book.

Rohn, Jim

36.

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

Wycherley, William

37.

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

38.

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

39.

Book love... is your pass to the greatest, the purest, and the most perfect pleasure that God has prepared for His creatures.

Trollope, Anthony

40.

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

Locke, John

41.

A good title is the title of a successful book.

Chandler, Raymond

42.

It is books that teach us to refine our pleasures when young, and to recall them with satisfaction when we are old.

Hunt, Leigh

43.

After all, the world is not a stage -- not to me: nor a theatre: nor a show-house of any sort. And art, especially novels, are not little theatres where the reader sits aloft and watches... and sighs, commiserates, condones and smiles. That's what you want a book to be: because it leaves you so safe and superior, with your two-dollar ticket to the show. And that's what my books are not and never will be. Whoever reads me will be in the thick of the scrimmage, and if he doesn't like it -- if he wants a safe seat in the audience -- let him read someone else.

Lawrence, D. H.

44.

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

45.

A novel is a mirror carried along a main road.

Stendhal, Henri B.

46.

We should be as careful of the books we read, as of the company we keep. The dead very often have more power than the living.

Edwards, Tryon

47.

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

48.

Today a reader, tomorrow a leader.

Fusselman, W.

49.

Books are those faithful mirrors that reflect to our mind the minds of sages and heroes.

Gibbon, Edward

50.

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

Butler, Samuel