Motivational Quotes

Books - reading

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

- Twain, Mark

Best Quotes about Books - reading

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

Early in the morning, at break of day, in all the freshness and dawn of one's strength, to read a book --I call that vicious!

Nietzsche, Friedrich

I suggest that the only books that influence us are those for which we are ready, and which have gone a little further down our particular path than we have yet got ourselves.

Forster, Edward M.

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

Shaw, George Bernard

When a book raises your spirit, and inspires you with noble and manly thoughts, seek for no other test of its excellence. It is good, and made by a good workman.

Bruyere, Jean De La

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

Parker, Dorothy

Footnotes are the finer-suckered surfaces that allow testicular paragraphs to hold fast to the wider reality of the library.

Baker, Nicholson

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

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

10.

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

Brodsky, Joseph

11.

Today a reader, tomorrow a leader.

Fusselman, W.

12.

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

13.

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

Sandwell, B. K.

14.

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

15.

The flood of print has turned reading into a process of gulping rather than savoring

Chappell, Warren

16.

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.

17.

The Brahmins say that in their books there are many predictions of times in which it will rain. But press those books as strongly as you can, you can not get out of them a drop of water. So you can not get out of all the books that contain the best precepts the smallest good deed.

Tolstoy, Count Leo

18.

A house without books is like a room without windows. No man has a right to bring up his children without surrounding them with books, if he has the means to buy them. It is a wrong to his family. Children learn to read by being in the presence of books. The love of knowledge comes with reading and grows upon it. And the love of knowledge, in a young mind, is almost always a warrant against the inferior excitement of passions and vices.

Mann, Horace

19.

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

20.

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

21.

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

22.

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

Butler, Samuel

23.

The most foolish kind of a book is a kind of leaky boat on the sea of wisdom; some of the wisdom will get in anyhow.

Holmes, Oliver Wendell

24.

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

25.

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

Trollope, Anthony

26.

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

27.

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

Lichtenberg, Georg C.

28.

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

Maugham, W. Somerset

29.

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

30.

I can't bear art that you can walk round and admire. A book should be either a bandit or a rebel or a man in the crowd.

Lawrence, D. H.

31.

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

Critchfield, Jim

32.

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

33.

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

34.

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

35.

If a book comes from the heart it will contrive to reach other hearts. All art and author craft are of small account to that.

Carlyle, Thomas

36.

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

Bulwer-Lytton, Edward G.

37.

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

Chamfort, Sebastien-Roch Nicolas De

38.

The good of a book lies in its being read. A book is made up of signs that speak of other signs, which in their turn speak of things. Without an eye to read them, a book contains signs that produce no concepts; therefore it is dumb.

Eco, Umberto

39.

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

40.

Books are those faithful mirrors that reflect to our mind the minds of sages and heroes.

Gibbon, Edward

41.

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.

42.

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

Proverb, American

43.

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

44.

A library is thought in cold storage.

Samuel, Herbert

45.

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

46.

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

Twain, Mark

47.

All my good reading, you might say, was done in the toilet. There are passages in Ulysses which can be read only in the toilet -- if one wants to extract the full flavor of their content.

Miller, Henry

48.

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.

49.

You've really got to start hitting the books because it's no joke out here.

Lee, Spike

50.

Tradition is but a meteor, which, if it once falls, cannot be rekindled. Memory, once interrupted, is not to be recalled. But written learning is a fixed luminary, which, after the cloud that had hidden it has passed away, is again bright in its proper station. So books are faithful repositories, which may be awhile neglected or forgotten, but when opened again, will again impart instruction.

Johnson