Motivational Quotes

Books - reading

One half who graduate from college never read another book.

- True, Herbert

Best Quotes about Books - reading

Ideally a book would have no order to it, and the reader would have to discover his own.

Vaneigem, Raoul

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

Pound, Ezra

To read too many books is harmful.

Zedong, Mao

He had read much, if one considers his long life; but his contemplation was much more than his reading. He was wont to say that if he had read as much as other men he should have known no more than other men.

Aubrey, John

The books one has written in the past have two surprises in store: one couldn't write them again, and wouldn't want to.

Rostand, Jean

Books are not men and yet they stay alive.

Benet, Stephen Vincent

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

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

Lichtenberg, Georg C.

Books and marriage go ill together.

Moliere

10.

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

Carey, Joyce

11.

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

Gibbon, Edward

12.

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

Channing, William Ellery

13.

Old books that have ceased to be of service should no more be abandoned than should old friends who have ceased to give pleasure.

Worsthorne, Sir Peregrine

14.

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

15.

'Tis the good reader that makes the good book; in every book he finds passages which seem to be confidences or sides hidden from all else and unmistakably meant for his ear; the profit of books is according to the sensibility of the reader; the profound thought or passion sleeps as in a mine, until it is discovered by an equal mind and heart.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

16.

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

Twain, Mark

17.

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

Fuller, Margaret

18.

When a book raises your spirit, and inspires you with noble and manly thoughts, seek for no other test of its excellence. It is good, and made by a good workman.

Bruyere, Jean De La

19.

To use books rightly, is to go to them for help; to appeal to them when our own knowledge and power fail; to be led by them into wider sight and purer conception than our own, and to receive from them the united sentence of the judges and councils of all time, against our solitary and unstable opinions.

Ruskin, John

20.

The only books that influence us are those for which we are ready, and which have gone a little farther down our particular path than we have yet got ourselves.

Forster, Edward M.

21.

I am a part of everything that I have read.

Kieran, John

22.

Read nothing that you do not care to remember, and remember nothing you do not mean to use.

Blackie, Professor

23.

I am not a speed reader. I am a speed understander.

Asimov, Isaac

24.

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

Coolio

25.

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

26.

A novel is a mirror carried along a main road.

Stendhal, Henri B.

27.

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

Howells, William Dean

28.

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

29.

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

30.

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

31.

Reading the Scriptures is an uplifting experience.

32.

To sit alone in the lamplight with a book spread out before you hold intimate converse with men of unseen generations -- such is pleasure beyond compare.

Kenko, Yoshida

33.

Everything in the world exists to end up in a book.

Mallarme, Stephane

34.

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

35.

Except a living man there is nothing more wonderful than a book! a message to us from the dead -- from human souls we never saw, who lived, perhaps, thousands of miles away. And yet these, in those little sheets of paper, speak to us, arouse us, terrify us, teach us, comfort us, open their hearts to us as brothers.

Kingsley, Charles

36.

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

Butler, Samuel

37.

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

38.

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

Tupper, Martin

39.

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

Byron, Lord

40.

The age of the book is almost gone.

Steiner, George

41.

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

42.

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

Phelps, William Lyon

43.

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

Phillips, Wendell

44.

Much reading is an oppression of the mind, and extinguishes the natural candle, which is the reason of so many senseless scholars in the world.

Penn, William

45.

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

46.

Digressions, incontestably, are the sunshine; they are the life, the soul of reading! Take them out of this book, for instance, --you might as well take the book along with them; --one cold external winter would reign in every page of it; restore them to the writer; --he steps forth like a bridegroom, --bids All-hail; brings in variety, and forbids the appetite to fail.

Sterne, Laurence

47.

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

Hugo, Victor

48.

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

49.

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

Johnson, Samuel

50.

No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader.

Frost, Robert