Motivational Quotes

Books - reading

The man who does not read books has no advantage over the man that can not read them.

- Twain, Mark

Best Quotes about Books - reading

The books we read should be chosen with great care, that they may be, as an Egyptian king wrote over his library, The medicines of the soul.

Hood, Paxton

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

Maclennan, Hugh

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.

Next to acquiring good friends, the best acquisition is that of good books.

Colton, Charles Caleb

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

The world of books is the most remarkable creation of man nothing else that he builds ever lasts monuments fall; nations perish; civilization grow old and die out; new races build others. But in the world of books are volumes that have seen this happen again and again and yet live on. Still young, still as fresh as the day they were written, still telling men's hearts, of the hearts of men centuries dead.

Day, Clarence

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

Shaw, George Bernard

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

The reason a writer writes a book is to forget a book and the reason a reader reads one is to remember it.

Wolfe, Thomas

10.

Some books leave us free and some books make us free.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

11.

The man who does not read books has no advantage over the man that can not read them.

Twain, Mark

12.

Who kills a man kills a reasonable creature, God's image, but thee who destroys a good book, kills reason itself.

Milton, John

13.

The lessons taught in great books are misleading. The commerce in life is rarely so simple and never so just.

Brookner, Anita

14.

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

15.

I wish I could write a beautiful book to break those hearts that are soon to cease to exist: a book of faith and small neat worlds and of people who live by the philosophies of popular songs.

16.

The printing press is either the greatest blessing or the greatest curse of modern times, sometimes one forgets which it is.

Barrie, Sir James M.

17.

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

Montagu, Lady Mary Wortley

18.

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

19.

I read the newspaper avidly. It is my one form of continuous fiction.

Bevan, Aneurin

20.

Everything in the world exists to end up in a book.

Mallarme, Stephane

21.

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

22.

My early and invincible love of reading I would not exchange for all the riches of India.

Gibbon, Edward

23.

The words of my book nothing, the drift of it everything.

Whitman, Walt

24.

Digressions, incontestably, are the sunshine; they are the life, the soul of reading! Take them out of this book, for instance, --you might as well take the book along with them; --one cold external winter would reign in every page of it; restore them to the writer; --he steps forth like a bridegroom, --bids All-hail; brings in variety, and forbids the appetite to fail.

Sterne, Laurence

25.

'Tis the good reader that makes the good book; in every book he finds passages which seem to be confidences or sides hidden from all else and unmistakably meant for his ear; the profit of books is according to the sensibility of the reader; the profound thought or passion sleeps as in a mine, until it is discovered by an equal mind and heart.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

26.

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

Spielberg, Steven

27.

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

28.

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

29.

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

Lichtenberg, Georg C.

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.

Books, books, books had found the secret of a garret-room piled high with cases in my father's name; Piled high, packed large, --where, creeping in and out among the giant fossils of my past, like some small nimble mouse between the ribs of a mastodon, I nibbled here and there at this or that box, pulling through the gap, in heats of terror, haste, victorious joy, the first book first. And how I felt it beat under my pillow, in the morning's dark. An hour before the sun would let me read! My books!

Browning, Elizabeth Barrett

32.

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

Murray, William

33.

Nine-tenths of the existing books are nonsense and the clever books are the refutation of that nonsense.

Disraeli, Benjamin

34.

In any situation, ask yourself: What strengths do I possess that can contribute towards accomplishing something in this situation? Then follow through.

35.

There was a time when the world acted on books; now books act on the world.

Joubert, Joseph

36.

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

37.

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

38.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

39.

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

Temple, Sir William

40.

A book worth reading is worth buying.

Ruskin, John

41.

If I have not read a book before, it is, for all intents and purposes, new to me whether it was printed yesterday or three hundred years ago.

Hazlitt, William

42.

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

Lowell, James Russell

43.

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

Secondat, Charles de

44.

Beware of the person of one book.

Aquinas, St. Thomas

45.

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

46.

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

47.

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

Maugham, W. Somerset

48.

Prerequisite for rereadability in books: that they be forgettable.

Rostand, Jean

49.

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

Twain, Mark

50.

Do we write books so that they shall merely be read? Don't we also write them for employment in the household? For one that is read from start to finish, thousands are leafed through, other thousands lie motionless, others are jammed against mouseholes, thrown at rats, others are stood on, sat on, drummed on, have gingerbread baked on them or are used to light pipes.

Lichtenberg, Georg C.