Motivational Quotes

Books - reading

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

- Twain, Mark

Best Quotes about Books - reading

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

Pound, Ezra

Until I feared I would lose it, I never loved to read. One does not love breathing.

Lee, Harper

You will be the same person in five as you are today except for the people you meet and the books you read.

Jones, Charles ''Tremendous''

Books succeed, and lives fail.

Browning, Elizabeth Barrett

The newest books are those that never grow old.

Jackson, George Holbrook

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

Faulkner, William

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.

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

Bulwer-Lytton, Edward G.

Miss a meal if you have to, but don't miss a book.

Rohn, Jim

10.

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

11.

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

12.

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

Barrett, E.S.

13.

A novel is a mirror carried along a main road.

Stendhal, Henri B.

14.

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

Camus, Albert

15.

The power of a text is different when it is read from when it is copied out. Only the copied text thus commands the soul of him who is occupied with it, whereas the mere reader never discovers the new aspects of his inner self that are opened by the text, that road cut through the interior jungle forever closing behind it: because the reader follows the movement of his mind in the free flight of day-dreaming, whereas the copier submits it to command.

Benjamin, Walter

16.

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

Hope, Anthony

17.

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

18.

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

Tupper, Martin

19.

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

Jackson, Holbrook

20.

Most books today seemed to have been written overnight from books read the day before.

Chamfort, Sebastien-Roch Nicolas De

21.

A multitude of books distracts the mind.

Socrates

22.

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

23.

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

Proverb, American

24.

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.

25.

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

Johnson, Samuel

26.

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

Byron, Lord

27.

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

28.

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

Maclennan, Hugh

29.

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

Coolio

30.

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

Mencken, H. L.

31.

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

32.

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

33.

A book may be compared to your neighbor: if it be good, it cannot last too long; if bad, you cannot get rid of it too early.

Brooke, Rupert

34.

After all manner of professors have done their best for us, the place we are to get knowledge is in books. The true university of these days is a collection of books.

Carlyle, Thomas

35.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

36.

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.

37.

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

38.

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

Howells, William Dean

39.

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

Twain, Mark

40.

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

Luther, Martin

41.

You will find most books worth reading are worth reading twice.

Morely, John

42.

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

43.

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

Bach, Richard

44.

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

Phillips, Wendell

45.

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

46.

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

47.

How can you dare teach a man to read until you've taught him everything else first?

Shaw, George Bernard

48.

The worst readers are those who behave like plundering troops: they take away a few things they can use, dirty and confound the remainder, and revile the whole.

Nietzsche, Friedrich

49.

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

Dawkins, John

50.

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