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

Reading a book is like re-writing it for yourself. You bring to a novel, anything you read, all your experience of the world. You bring your history and you read it in your own terms.

Carter, Angela

In the case of good books, the point is not how many of them you can get through, but rather how many can get through to you.

Adler, Mortimer J.

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

Lytton, Lord Edward

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

Read as you taste fruit or savor wine, or enjoy friendship, love or life.

Jackson, Holbrook

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

Reading the Scriptures is an uplifting experience.

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

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

Rohn, Jim

10.

One half who graduate from college never read another book.

True, Herbert

11.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

12.

Everything you need for better future and success has already been written. And guess what? All you have to do is go to the library.

Rohn, Jim

13.

When I am dead, I hope it may be said: His sins were scarlet, but his books were read.

Belloc, Hilaire

14.

Thy books should, like thy friends, not many be, yet such wherein men may thy judgment see.

Wycherley, William

15.

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

16.

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

17.

Books are the blessed chloroform of the mind.

Chambers, Robert

18.

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

19.

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

20.

No story is the same to us after a lapse of time; or rather we who read it are no longer the same interpreters.

Eliot, George

21.

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.

22.

Any book that helps a child to form a habit of reading, to make reading one of his deep and continuing needs, is good for him.

McKenna, Richard

23.

Today a reader, tomorrow a leader.

Fusselman, W.

24.

There is a set of religious, or rather moral, writings which teach that virtue is the certain road to happiness, and vice to misery in this world. A very wholesome and comfortable doctrine, and to which we have but one objection, namely, that it is not true.

Fielding, Henry

25.

Reading furnishes the mind only with material for knowledge; it is thinking that makes what we read ours.

Locke, John

26.

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

Montagu, Lady Mary Wortley

27.

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

Byron, Lord

28.

The mere brute pleasure of reading --the sort of pleasure a cow must have in grazing.

Chesterton, Gilbert K.

29.

You can either read something many times in order to be assured that you got it all, or else you can define your purpose and use techniques which will assure that you have met it and gotten what you need.

Kump, Peter

30.

Once we have learned to read, meaning of words can somehow register without consciousness.

Marcel, Anthony

31.

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

Lawrence, D. H.

32.

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

33.

I feel like I'm drowning. Every night, I'm carrying home loads of things to read but I'm too exhausted. I keep clipping things and Xeroxing them and planning to read them eventually, but I just end up throwing it all away and feeling guilty.

Levine, Ghita

34.

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

Secondat, Charles de

35.

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

36.

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

Parker, Dorothy

37.

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

38.

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

Hadas, Moses

39.

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

40.

The multitude of books is a great evil. There is no limit to this fever for writing.

Luther, Martin

41.

The newest books are those that never grow old.

Jackson, George Holbrook

42.

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

43.

I am what libraries and librarians have made me, with little assistance from a professor of Greek and poets.

Sandwell, B. K.

44.

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

45.

Beware of the person of one book.

Aquinas, St. Thomas

46.

As writers become more numerous, it is natural for readers to become more indolent; whence must necessarily arise a desire of attaining knowledge with the greatest possible ease.

Goldsmith, Oliver

47.

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

Ruskin, John

48.

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

49.

A bad book is the worse that it cannot repent. It has not been the devil's policy to keep the masses of mankind in ignorance; but finding that they will read, he is doing all in his power to poison their books.

Kirk, E.N.

50.

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

Carlyle, Thomas