Motivational Quotes

Books - reading

There are books so alive that you're always afraid that while you weren't reading, the book has gone and changed, has shifted like a river; while you went on living, it went on living too, and like a river moved on and moved away. No one has stepped twice into the same river. But did anyone ever step twice into the same book?

- Tsvetaeva, Marina

Best Quotes about Books - reading

I don't think any good book is based on factual experience. Bad books are about things the writer already knew before he wrote them.

Fuentes, Carlos

Books had instant replay long before televised sports.

Williams, Bert

A book worth reading is worth buying.

Ruskin, John

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

Mcluhan, Marshall

From the moment I picked your book up until I laid it down I was convulsed with laughter. Some day I intend reading it.

Marx, Groucho

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

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

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

Camus, Albert

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

Hubbard, Elbert

10.

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

11.

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

12.

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

13.

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

Dane, Frank

14.

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

Bevan, Aneurin

15.

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

Lichtenberg, Georg C.

16.

The newest books are those that never grow old.

Jackson, George Holbrook

17.

To feel most beautifully alive means to be reading something beautiful, ready always to apprehend in the flow of language the sudden flash of poetry.

Bachelard, Gaston

18.

Beware of the person of one book.

Aquinas, St. Thomas

19.

Readers are plentiful: thinkers are rare.

Martineau, Harriet

20.

The reason a writer writes a book is to forget a book and the reason a reader reads one is to remember it.

Wolfe, Thomas

21.

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

Twain, Mark

22.

The books that the world calls immoral are the books that show the world its own shame.

Wilde, Oscar

23.

A house without books is like a room without windows. No man has a right to bring up his children without surrounding them with books, if he has the means to buy them. It is a wrong to his family. Children learn to read by being in the presence of books. The love of knowledge comes with reading and grows upon it. And the love of knowledge, in a young mind, is almost always a warrant against the inferior excitement of passions and vices.

Mann, Horace

24.

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

25.

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

Byron, Lord

26.

The good parts of a book may be only something a writer is lucky enough to overhear or it may be the wreck of his whole damn life --and one is as good as the other.

Hemingway, Ernest

27.

My early and invincible love of reading I would not exchange for all the riches of India.

Gibbon, Edward

28.

With one day's reading a man may have the key in his hands.

Pound, Ezra

29.

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

30.

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

Tupper, Martin

31.

I've never know any trouble than an hour's reading didn't assuage.

Secondat, Charles de

32.

Books are divided into two classes, the books of the hour and the books of all time.

Ruskin, John

33.

Books are men of higher stature; the only men that speak aloud for future times to hear.

Barrett, E.S.

34.

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

Channing, William Ellery

35.

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

Howells, William Dean

36.

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

Critchfield, Jim

37.

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

Ruskin, John

38.

Begin to read a book that will help you move toward your dream.

Brown, Les

39.

Prerequisite for rereadability in books: that they be forgettable.

Rostand, Jean

40.

A good book is the very essence of a good man. His virtues survive in it, while the foibles and faults of his actual life are forgotten. All the goodly company of the excellent and great sit around my table, or look down on me from yonder shelves, waiting patiently to answer my questions and enrich me with their wisdom. A precious book is a foretaste of immortality.

Cuyler, Theodore L.

41.

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

Hope, Anthony

42.

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

43.

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

44.

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

45.

You've really got to start hitting the books because it's no joke out here.

Lee, Spike

46.

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

47.

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

Frost, Robert

48.

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

49.

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

Rohn, Jim

50.

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