Motivational Quotes

Books - reading

People are much more willing to lend you books than bookcases.

- Twain, Mark

Best Quotes about Books - reading

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

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

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

Everywhere I have sought rest and not found it, except sitting in a corner by myself with a little book.

Kempis, Thomas

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

Only a generation of readers will span a generation of writers.

Spielberg, Steven

Read Homer once, and you can read no more. For all books else appear so mean, and so poor. Verse will seem prose; but still persist to read, and Homer will be all the books you need.

Buckingham, Duke of

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

Carlyle, Thomas

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

10.

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

11.

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

Dawkins, John

12.

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

Shaw, George Bernard

13.

Much reading is an oppression of the mind, and extinguishes the natural candle, which is the reason of so many senseless scholars in the world.

Penn, William

14.

A vacuum of ideas affects people differently than a vacuum of air, otherwise readers of books would be constantly collapsing.

Lichtenberg, Georg C.

15.

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

16.

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

Hubbard, Elbert

17.

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

Rohn, Jim

18.

One half who graduate from college never read another book.

True, Herbert

19.

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

20.

This is not a book. This is libel, slander, defamation of character. This is not a book, in the ordinary sense of the word. No, this is a prolonged insult, a gob of spit in the face of Art, a kick in the pants to God, Man, Destiny, Time, Love, Beauty... what you will. I am going to sing for you, a little off key perhaps, but I will sing.

Miller, Henry

21.

Fiction reveals truth that reality obscures.

West, Jessamyn

22.

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

23.

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

24.

The successful Accelerated Reader is able to read larger than normal blocks or bites of the printed page with each eye stop. He has accepted, without reservation, the philosophy that the most important benefit of reading is the gaining of information, ideas, mental picture and entertainment-not the fretting over words. He has come to the realization that words in and of themselves are for the most part insignificant.

Cutler, Wade E.

25.

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

26.

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

Wycherley, William

27.

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

Lowell, James Russell

28.

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

Marcel, Anthony

29.

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

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.

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

32.

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

33.

How many a man has dated a new era in his life from the reading of a book! The book exists for us, perchance, that will explain our miracles and reveal new ones. The at present unutterable things we may find somewhere uttered.

Thoreau, Henry David

34.

Reading is a basic tool in the living of a good life.

Adler, Mortimer J.

35.

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.

36.

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

37.

Does there, I wonder, exist a being who has read all, or approximately all, that the person of average culture is supposed to have read, and that not to have read is a social sin? If such a being does exist, surely he is an old, a very old man.

Bennett, Arnold

38.

Who ever converses among old books will be hard to please among the new.

Temple, Sir William

39.

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

40.

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

Proverb, American

41.

There is creative reading as well as creative writing.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

42.

The age of the book is almost gone.

Steiner, George

43.

We should be as careful of the books we read, as of the company we keep. The dead very often have more power than the living.

Edwards, Tryon

44.

A great book should leave you with many experiences and slightly exhausted at the end. You should live several lives while reading it.

Styron, William

45.

Books are but waste paper unless we spend in action the wisdom we get from thought -- asleep. When we are weary of the living, we may repair to the dead, who have nothing of peevishness, pride, or design in their conversation.

Collier, Jeremy

46.

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

Mansfield, Katherine

47.

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

Wilde, Oscar

48.

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

Barrett, E.S.

49.

What is important is not to be able to read rapidly, but to be able to decide what not to read.