Motivational Quotes

Books - reading

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.

Best Quotes about Books - reading

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

Howells, William Dean

The man who does not read books has no advantage over the man that can not read them.

Twain, Mark

When you have mastered numbers, you will in fact no longer be reading numbers, any more than you read words when reading books You will be reading meanings.

Geneen, Harold S.

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

Hadas, Moses

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

Bach, Richard

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

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

Hubbard, Elbert

A person of mature years and ripe development, who is expecting nothing from literature but the corroboration and renewal of past ideas, may find satisfaction in a lucidity so complete as to occasion no imaginative excitement, but young and ambitious students are not content with it. They seek the excitement because they are capable of the growth that it accompanies.

Cooley, Charles Horton

She could give herself up to the written word as naturally as a good dancer to music or a fine swimmer to water. The only difficulty was that after finishing the last sentence she was left with a feeling at once hollow and uncomfortably full. Exactly like indigestion.

Rhys, Jean

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.

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

Hunt, Leigh

12.

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

Jackson, Holbrook

13.

A multitude of books distracts the mind.

Socrates

14.

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

Colton, Charles Caleb

15.

I would sooner read a timetable or a catalog than nothing at all.

Maugham, W. Somerset

16.

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

17.

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.

18.

A novel must be exceptionally good to live as long as the average cat.

Maclennan, Hugh

19.

A book that is shut is but a block.

Fuller, Thomas

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 wicked book cannot repent.

Proverb

22.

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

Parker, Dorothy

23.

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

24.

A great book should leave you with many experiences and slightly exhausted at the end. You should live several lives while reading it.

Styron, William

25.

A big leather-bound volume makes an ideal razor strap. A thin book is useful to stick under a table with a broken caster to steady it. A large, flat atlas can be used to cover a window with a broken pane. And a thick, old-fashioned heavy book with a clasp is the finest thing in the world to throw at a noisy cat.

Twain, Mark

26.

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

Channing, William Ellery

27.

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

28.

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

Camus, Albert

29.

Books are lighthouses erected in the great sea of time.

Whipple, Edwin P.

30.

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

31.

Who ever converses among old books will be hard to please among the new.

Temple, Sir William

32.

It is from books that wise people derive consolation in the troubles of life.

Hugo, Victor

33.

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

Gibbon, Edward

34.

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

35.

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

Marcel, Anthony

36.

Reading makes immigrants of us all. It takes us away from home, but more important, it finds homes for us everywhere.

Rochman, Hazel

37.

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

38.

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

39.

How can you dare teach a man to read until you've taught him everything else first?

Shaw, George Bernard

40.

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

Schopenhauer, Arthur

41.

Who kills a man kills a reasonable creature, God's image, but thee who destroys a good book, kills reason itself.

Milton, John

42.

I heard his library burned down and both books were destroyed -- and one of them hadn't even been colored in yet.

Dawkins, John

43.

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

Porter, Noah

44.

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

Rohn, Jim

45.

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

46.

Books are the blessed chloroform of the mind.

Chambers, Robert

47.

No furniture is so charming as books.

Smith, Sydney

48.

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

Lytton, Lord Edward

49.

After all manner of professors have done their best for us, the place we are to get knowledge is in books. The true university of these days is a collection of books.

Carlyle, Thomas

50.

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

Phillips, Wendell