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

You will, I am sure, agree with me that... if page 534 only finds us in the second chapter, the length of the first one must have been really intolerable.

Doyle, Sir Arthur Conan

He had read much, if one considers his long life; but his contemplation was much more than his reading. He was wont to say that if he had read as much as other men he should have known no more than other men.

Aubrey, John

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

Coolio

I feel a kind of reverence for the first books of young authors. There is so much aspiration in them, so much audacious hope and trembling fear, so much of the heart's history, that all errors and shortcomings are for a while lost sight of in the amiable self assertion of youth.

Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth

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

Lowell, James Russell

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

Critchfield, Jim

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

Locke, John

Books are masters who instruct us without rods or ferules, without words or anger, without bread or money. If you approach them, they are not asleep; if you seek them, they do not hide; if you blunder, they do not scold; if you are ignorant, they do not laugh at you.

Bury, Richard De

Books are the blessed chloroform of the mind.

Chambers, Robert

10.

A book worth reading is worth buying.

Ruskin, John

11.

A book is a part of life, a manifestation of life, just as much as a tree or a horse or a star. It obeys its own rhythms, its own laws, whether it be a novel, a play, or a diary. The deep, hidden rhythm of life is always there -- that of the pulse, the heart beat.

Miller, Henry

12.

Beware you be not swallowed up in books! An ounce of love is worth a pound of knowledge.

Wesley, John

13.

A successful book cannot afford to be more than ten percent new.

Mcluhan, Marshall

14.

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

Jackson, Holbrook

15.

Surviving and thriving as a professional today demands two new approaches to the written word. First, it requires a new approach to orchestrating information, by skillfully choosing what to read and what to ignore. Second, it requires a new approach to integrating information, by reading faster and with greater comprehension.

Calano, Jimmy

16.

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

17.

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

Maclennan, Hugh

18.

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

Luther, Martin

19.

The greatest gift is the passion for reading. It is cheap, it consoles, it distracts, it excites, it gives you knowledge of the world and experience of a wide kind. It is a moral illumination.

Hardwick, Elizabeth

20.

The age of the book is almost gone.

Steiner, George

21.

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

Johnson, Samuel

22.

Books in a large university library system: 2, 000,000. Books in an average large city library: 1 0,000. Average number of books in a chain bookstore: 30, 000. Books in an average neighborhood branch library: 20, 000.

Horowitz, Lois

23.

She could give herself up to the written word as naturally as a good dancer to music or a fine swimmer to water. The only difficulty was that after finishing the last sentence she was left with a feeling at once hollow and uncomfortably full. Exactly like indigestion.

Rhys, Jean

24.

A multitude of books distracts the mind.

Socrates

25.

The last thing one discovers in composing a work is what to put first.

Pascal, Blaise

26.

To read well, that is, to read true books in a true spirit, is a noble exercise, and one that will task the reader more than any other exercise which the customs of the day esteem. It requires a training such as the athletes underwent, the steady intention almost of the whole life to this object.

Thoreau, Henry David

27.

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

28.

Readers are plentiful: thinkers are rare.

Martineau, Harriet

29.

Fiction reveals truth that reality obscures.

West, Jessamyn

30.

Books are not absolutely dead things, but do contain a certain potency of life in them, to be as active as the soul whose progeny they are; they preserve, as in a vial, the purest efficacy and extraction of the living intellect that bred them.

Milton, John

31.

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

32.

What is reading, but silent conversation.

Landor, Walter Savage

33.

The reason that fiction is more interesting than any other form of literature, to those who really like to study people, is that in fiction the author can really tell the truth without humiliating himself.

Roosevelt, Eleanor

34.

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

Chesterton, Gilbert K.

35.

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

Kempis, Thomas

36.

For a good book has this quality, that it is not merely a petrifaction of its author, but that once it has been tossed behind, like Deucalion's little stone, it acquires a separate and vivid life of its own.

Lejeune, Caroline

37.

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

Tupper, Martin

38.

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

Montagu, Lady Mary Wortley

39.

It is books that teach us to refine our pleasures when young, and to recall them with satisfaction when we are old.

Hunt, Leigh

40.

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.

41.

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

Camus, Albert

42.

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.

43.

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

44.

A person who publishes a book appears willfully in public with his pants down.

Millay, Edna St. Vincent

45.

A bibliophile of little means is likely to suffer often. Books don't slip from his hands but fly past him through the air, high as birds, high as prices.

Neruda, Pablo

46.

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

Howells, William Dean

47.

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

48.

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

49.

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

Lichtenberg, Georg C.

50.

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