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

The book to read is not the one which thinks for you, but the one which makes you think. No book in the world equals the Bible for that.

Mccosh

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

Pound, Ezra

A book is a mirror: If an ass peers into it, you can't expect an apostle to look out.

Lichtenberg, Georg C.

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

Shaw, George Bernard

A good title is the title of a successful book.

Chandler, Raymond

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

Mencken, H. L.

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

The lessons taught in great books are misleading. The commerce in life is rarely so simple and never so just.

Brookner, Anita

Many books require no thought from those who read them, and for a very simple reason: they made no such demand upon those who wrote them. Those works, therefore, are the most valuable, that set our thinking faculties in the fullest operation. understand them.

Clarendon

10.

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

11.

Some books leave us free and some books make us free.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

12.

When I get a little money, I buy books; and if any is left I buy food and clothes.

Erasmus, Desiderius

13.

Books are the bees which carry the quickening pollen from one to another mind.

Lowell, James Russell

14.

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

Coolio

15.

A book that is shut is but a block.

Fuller, Thomas

16.

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

Mencken, H. L.

17.

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

18.

Books are not men and yet they stay alive.

Benet, Stephen Vincent

19.

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

Tupper, Martin

20.

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

Joubert, Joseph

21.

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

22.

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

Hugo, Victor

23.

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

Lee, Harper

24.

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

25.

The reading or non-reading a book will never keep down a single petticoat.

Byron, Lord

26.

You will be the same person in five as you are today except for the people you meet and the books you read.

Jones, Charles ''Tremendous''

27.

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

28.

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

29.

Most books today seemed to have been written overnight from books read the day before.

Chamfort, Sebastien-Roch Nicolas De

30.

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

31.

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

Parker, Dorothy

32.

Books and marriage go ill together.

Moliere

33.

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

Carlyle, Thomas

34.

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

Schopenhauer, Arthur

35.

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

36.

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

37.

I love to lose myself in other men's minds. When I am not walking, I am reading. I cannot sit and think; books think for me.

Lamb, Charles

38.

You should read books like you take medicine, by advice, and not by advertisement.

Ruskin, John

39.

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

Faulkner, William

40.

The newest books are those that never grow old.

Jackson, George Holbrook

41.

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

42.

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

43.

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

Bevan, Aneurin

44.

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

Camus, Albert

45.

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

46.

A dose of poison can do its work but once. A bad book can go on poisoning minds for generations.

Murray, William

47.

A wicked book cannot repent.

Proverb

48.

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

Mcluhan, Marshall

49.

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

Hugo, Victor

50.

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