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

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

Leacock, Stephen B.

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

Twain, Mark

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

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

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

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

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

Next, in importance to books are their titles.

Davies, Paul

The book you don't read won't help.

Rohn, Jim

10.

I feel a kind of reverence for the first books of young authors. There is so much aspiration in them, so much audacious hope and trembling fear, so much of the heart's history, that all errors and shortcomings are for a while lost sight of in the amiable self assertion of youth.

Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth

11.

A book might be written on the injustice of the just.

Hope, Anthony

12.

I feel like I'm drowning. Every night, I'm carrying home loads of things to read but I'm too exhausted. I keep clipping things and Xeroxing them and planning to read them eventually, but I just end up throwing it all away and feeling guilty.

Levine, Ghita

13.

Beware of the person of one book.

Aquinas, St. Thomas

14.

A library is thought in cold storage.

Samuel, Herbert

15.

Very young children eat their books, literally devouring their contents. This is one reason for the scarcity of first editions of Alice in Wonderland and other favorites of the nursery.

Rosenbach, A. S. W.

16.

There are very many people who read simply to prevent themselves from thinking.

Lichtenberg, Georg C.

17.

Books had instant replay long before televised sports.

Williams, Bert

18.

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

19.

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

Coolio

20.

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

21.

A bad book is the worse that it cannot repent. It has not been the devil's policy to keep the masses of mankind in ignorance; but finding that they will read, he is doing all in his power to poison their books.

Kirk, E.N.

22.

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

Lawrence, D. H.

23.

Read as you taste fruit or savor wine, or enjoy friendship, love or life.

Jackson, Holbrook

24.

Books are not men and yet they stay alive.

Benet, Stephen Vincent

25.

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

26.

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

27.

'Tis pleasant, sure, to see one's name in print; A book's a book, although there's nothing in it.

Byron, Lord

28.

Today a reader, tomorrow a leader.

Fusselman, W.

29.

Books and marriage go ill together.

Moliere

30.

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

31.

Books are masters who instruct us without rods or ferules, without words or anger, without bread or money. If you approach them, they are not asleep; if you seek them, they do not hide; if you blunder, they do not scold; if you are ignorant, they do not laugh at you.

Bury, Richard De

32.

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

33.

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

Mencken, H. L.

34.

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

Mencken, H. L.

35.

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

36.

The things I want to know are in books; my best friend is the man who'll get me a book I ain't read.

Lincoln, Abraham

37.

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

38.

For a good book has this quality, that it is not merely a petrifaction of its author, but that once it has been tossed behind, like Deucalion's little stone, it acquires a separate and vivid life of its own.

Lejeune, Caroline

39.

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

Dane, Frank

40.

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

Joubert, Joseph

41.

A person who publishes a book appears willfully in public with his pants down.

Millay, Edna St. Vincent

42.

Learning to read has been reduced to a process of mastering a series of narrow, specific, hierarchical skills. Where armed-forces recruits learn the components of a rifle or the intricacies of close order drill by the numbers, recruits to reading learn its mechanics sound by sound and word by word.

Gross, Jacquelyn

43.

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

Porter, Noah

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.

The age of the book is almost gone.

Steiner, George

46.

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

Tupper, Martin

47.

Don't just read the easy stuff. You may be entertained by it, but you will never grow from it.

Rohn, Jim

48.

You will find most books worth reading are worth reading twice.

Morely, John

49.

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

50.

Don't ask me who's influenced me. A lion is made up of the lambs he's digested, and I've been reading all my life.

Seferis, Giorgos