Motivational Quotes

Books - reading

A big leather-bound volume makes an ideal razor strap. A thin book is useful to stick under a table with a broken caster to steady it. A large, flat atlas can be used to cover a window with a broken pane. And a thick, old-fashioned heavy book with a clasp is the finest thing in the world to throw at a noisy cat.

- Twain, Mark

Best Quotes about Books - reading

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

Channing, William Ellery

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

Phelps, William Lyon

In science, read by preference the newest works. In literature, read the oldest. The classics are always modern.

Lytton, Lord Edward

The newest books are those that never grow old.

Jackson, George Holbrook

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

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.

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

Trollope, Anthony

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 furniture is so charming as books.

Smith, Sydney

10.

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

Lichtenberg, Georg C.

11.

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

12.

A novel is a mirror carried along a main road.

Stendhal, Henri B.

13.

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.

14.

I am a part of everything that I have read.

Kieran, John

15.

There are worse crimes than burning books. One of them is not reading them.

Brodsky, Joseph

16.

One sheds one's sicknesses in books -- repeats and presents again one's emotions, to be master of them.

Lawrence, D. H.

17.

Of all the ways of acquiring books, writing them oneself is regarded as the most praiseworthy method. Writers are really people who write books not because they are poor, but because they are dissatisfied with the books which they could buy but do not like.

Benjamin, Walter

18.

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

Mencken, H. L.

19.

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

Voltaire

20.

The pleasure of reading is doubled when one lives with another who shares the same books.

Mansfield, Katherine

21.

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

22.

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

23.

Then I though of reading -- the nice and subtle happiness of reading ... this joy not dulled by age, this polite and unpunishable vice, this selfish, serene, lifelong intoxication.

Smith, Logan Pearsall

24.

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

Hubbard, Elbert

25.

A good title is the title of a successful book.

Chandler, Raymond

26.

Americans will listen, but they do not care to read. War and Peace must wait for the leisure of retirement, which never really comes: meanwhile it helps to furnish the living room. Blockbusting fiction is bought as furniture. Unread, it maintains its value. Read, it looks like money wasted. Cunningly, Americans know that books contain a person, and they want the person, not the book.

Burgess, Anthony

27.

I know every book of mine by its smell, and I have but to put my nose between the pages to be reminded of all sorts of things.

Gissing, George Robert

28.

The classics are only primitive literature. They belong to the same class as primitive machinery and primitive music and primitive medicine.

Leacock, Stephen B.

29.

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

30.

A man ought to read just as his inclination leads him; for what he reads as a task will do him little good.

Johnson, Samuel

31.

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

Montagu, Lady Mary Wortley

32.

Hypocrite reader -- my fellow -- my brother!

Baudelaire, Charles

33.

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

Hood, Thomas

34.

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

35.

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

36.

There is no such thing as a moral book or an immoral book. Books are well written or badly written. That is all.

Wilde, Oscar

37.

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

Hugo, Victor

38.

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

Frost, Robert

39.

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

Maclennan, Hugh

40.

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

Murray, William

41.

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

Schopenhauer, Arthur

42.

Books, like friends, should be few and well chosen. Like friends, too, we should return to them again and again for, like true friends, they will never fail us -- never cease to instruct -- never cloy.

Colton, Charles Caleb

43.

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

Phillips, Wendell

44.

He that loves a book will never want a faithful friend, a wholesome counselor, a cheerful companion, an effectual comforter. By study, by reading, by thinking, one may innocently divert and pleasantly entertain himself, as in all weathers, as in all fortunes.

Barrow

45.

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

Butler, Samuel

46.

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

47.

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

48.

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

49.

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

Bach, Richard

50.

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

Dawkins, John