Motivational Quotes

Books - reading

Education... has produced a vast population able to read but unable to distinguish what is worth reading, an easy prey to sensations and cheap appeals.

- Trevelyan, G. M.

Best Quotes about Books - reading

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

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

Bach, Richard

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

Hadas, Moses

You are wise, witty and wonderful, but you spend too much time reading this sort of stuff.

Critchfield, Jim

We ought to reverence books; to look on them as useful and mighty things. If they are good and true, whether they are about religion, politics, farming, trade, law, or medicine, they are the message of Christ, the maker of all things -- the teacher of all truth.

Kingsley, Charles

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

Maclennan, Hugh

I wish I could write a beautiful book to break those hearts that are soon to cease to exist: a book of faith and small neat worlds and of people who live by the philosophies of popular songs.

Every abridgement of a good book is a fool abridged.

Montaigne, Michel Eyquem De

No entertainment is so cheap as reading, nor is any pleasure so lasting.

Montagu, Lady Mary Wortley

10.

The age of the book is almost gone.

Steiner, George

11.

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

Dawkins, John

12.

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

13.

Books and marriage go ill together.

Moliere

14.

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

Faulkner, William

15.

All the known world, excepting only savage nations, is governed by books.

Voltaire

16.

What we become depends on what we read after all the professors have finished with us. The greatest university of all is the collection of books.

Carlyle, Thomas

17.

The Brahmins say that in their books there are many predictions of times in which it will rain. But press those books as strongly as you can, you can not get out of them a drop of water. So you can not get out of all the books that contain the best precepts the smallest good deed.

Tolstoy, Count Leo

18.

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

19.

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

Joubert, Joseph

20.

No man understands a deep book until he has seen and lived at least part of its contents.

Pound, Ezra

21.

The real risks for any artist are taken in pushing the work to the limits of what is possible, in the attempt to increase the sum of what it is possible to think. Books become good when they go to this edge and risk falling over it --when they endanger the artist by reason of what he has, or has not, artistically dared.

Rushdie, Salman

22.

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.

23.

Somewhere, everywhere, now hidden, now apparent in what ever is written down, is the form of a human being. If we seek to know him, are we idly occupied?

Woolf, Virginia

24.

Books are lighthouses erected in the great sea of time.

Whipple, Edwin P.

25.

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

26.

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

27.

Books are the best of things if well used; if abused, among the worst. They are good for nothing but to inspire. I had better never see a book than be warped by its attraction clean out of my own orbit, and made a satellite instead of a system.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

28.

No furniture is so charming as books.

Smith, Sydney

29.

The worst readers are those who behave like plundering troops: they take away a few things they can use, dirty and confound the remainder, and revile the whole.

Nietzsche, Friedrich

30.

What is a diary as a rule? A document useful to the person who keeps it. Dull to the contemporary who reads it and invaluable to the student, centuries afterwards, who treasures it.

Terry, Helen

31.

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

Hunt, Leigh

32.

All the best stories in the world are but one story in reality -- the story of escape. It is the only thing which interests us all and at all times, how to escape.

Benson, Arthur Christopher

33.

Without books the development of civilization would have been impossible. They are the engines of change, windows on the world, Lighthouses as the poet said erected in the sea of time. They are companions, teachers, magicians, bankers of the treasures of the mind, Books are humanity in print.

Schopenhauer, Arthur

34.

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

Descartes, Rene

35.

A house is not a home unless it contains food and fire for the mind as well as the body.

Fuller, Margaret

36.

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

37.

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

38.

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

Chesterton, Gilbert K.

39.

The more sins you confess, the more books you will sell.

Proverb, American

40.

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

Johnson, Samuel

41.

If a book comes from the heart it will contrive to reach other hearts. All art and author craft are of small account to that.

Carlyle, Thomas

42.

Beware you be not swallowed up in books! An ounce of love is worth a pound of knowledge.

Wesley, John

43.

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

44.

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

45.

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

Hope, Anthony

46.

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

Parker, Dorothy

47.

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

48.

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

Twain, Mark

49.

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

Wycherley, William

50.

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

Howells, William Dean