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

When we read a story, we inhabit it. The covers of the book are like a roof and four walls. What is to happen next will take place within the four walls of the story. And this is possible because the story's voice makes everything its own.

Berger, John

In science read the newest works, in literature read the oldest.

Bulwer-Lytton, Edward G.

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

Wesley, John

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

Books are masters who instruct us without rods or ferules, without words or anger, without bread or money. If you approach them, they are not asleep; if you seek them, they do not hide; if you blunder, they do not scold; if you are ignorant, they do not laugh at you.

Bury, Richard De

We are too civil to books. For a few golden sentences we will turn over and actually read a volume of four or five hundred pages.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

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.

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

Brookner, Anita

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.

10.

Most books, like their authors, are born to die; of only a few books can it be said that death has no dominion over them; they live, and their influence lives forever.

Swartz, J.

11.

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

Critchfield, Jim

12.

Our high respect for a well read person is praise enough for literature.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

13.

A good title is the title of a successful book.

Chandler, Raymond

14.

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

Byron, Lord

15.

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

Channing, William Ellery

16.

The things I want to know are in books; my best friend is the man who'll get me a book I ain't read.

Lincoln, Abraham

17.

Book love... is your pass to the greatest, the purest, and the most perfect pleasure that God has prepared for His creatures.

Trollope, Anthony

18.

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

Frost, Robert

19.

The age of the book is almost gone.

Steiner, George

20.

A book that is shut is but a block.

Fuller, Thomas

21.

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

Mallarme, Stephane

22.

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

23.

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

Proverb, American

24.

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

Hadas, Moses

25.

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

26.

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

27.

Books succeed, and lives fail.

Browning, Elizabeth Barrett

28.

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

Faulkner, William

29.

When the book comes out it may hurt you -- but in order for me to do it, it had to hurt me first. I can only tell you about yourself as much as I can face about myself.

Baldwin, James

30.

An empty book is like an infant's soul, in which anything may be written. It is capable of all things, but containeth nothing. I have a mind to fill this with profitable wonders.

Traherne, Thomas

31.

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

32.

A person who publishes a book appears willfully in public with his pants down.

Millay, Edna St. Vincent

33.

If a secret history of books could be written, and the author's private thoughts and meanings noted down alongside of his story, how many insipid volumes would become interesting, and dull tales excite the reader!

Thackeray, William M.

34.

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

Rohn, Jim

35.

Reading is to the mind what exercise is to the body. It is wholesome and bracing for the mind to have its faculties kept on the stretch.

Steele, Sir Richard

36.

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

37.

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

Fuller, Margaret

38.

God be thanked for books; they are the voices of the distant and the dead, and make us heirs of the spiritual life of past ages.

Channing, William Ellery

39.

Very young children eat their books, literally devouring their contents. This is one reason for the scarcity of first editions of Alice in Wonderland and other favorites of the nursery.

Rosenbach, A. S. W.

40.

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

Lowell, James Russell

41.

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

Hope, Anthony

42.

One always tends to overpraise a long book, because one has got through it.

Forster, Edward M.

43.

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.

44.

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

Montagu, Lady Mary Wortley

45.

My books kept me from the ring, the dog-pit, the tavern, and the saloon.

Hood, Thomas

46.

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

Maugham, W. Somerset

47.

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

Byron, Lord

48.

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

49.

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

50.

Every abridgement of a good book is a fool abridged.

Montaigne, Michel Eyquem De