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

I am not a speed reader. I am a speed understander.

Asimov, Isaac

I love to lose myself in other men's minds. When I am not walking, I am reading. I cannot sit and think; books think for me.

Lamb, Charles

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

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

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

Beware of the person of one book.

Aquinas, St. Thomas

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

Adler, Mortimer J.

A person of mature years and ripe development, who is expecting nothing from literature but the corroboration and renewal of past ideas, may find satisfaction in a lucidity so complete as to occasion no imaginative excitement, but young and ambitious students are not content with it. They seek the excitement because they are capable of the growth that it accompanies.

Cooley, Charles Horton

To read too many books is harmful.

Zedong, Mao

10.

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

Dawkins, John

11.

I divide all readers into two classes: those who read to remember and those who read to forget.

Phelps, William Lyon

12.

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

Luther, Martin

13.

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

Bevan, Aneurin

14.

Old books, you know well, are books of the world's youth, and new books are the fruits of its age.

Holmes, Oliver Wendell

15.

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.

16.

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

Kempis, Thomas

17.

There are very many people who read simply to prevent themselves from thinking.

Lichtenberg, Georg C.

18.

Readers are plentiful: thinkers are rare.

Martineau, Harriet

19.

A novel is a mirror carried along a main road.

Stendhal, Henri B.

20.

Read good, big important things.

Noonan, Peggy

21.

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

Chamfort, Sebastien-Roch Nicolas De

22.

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

Joubert, Joseph

23.

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

Pound, Ezra

24.

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

Lee, Harper

25.

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

Wycherley, William

26.

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

27.

All the best stories in the world are but one story in reality -- the story of escape. It is the only thing which interests us all and at all times, how to escape.

Benson, Arthur Christopher

28.

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

29.

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

Mccay, James T.

30.

Hypocrite reader -- my fellow -- my brother!

Baudelaire, Charles

31.

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

Rohn, Jim

32.

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

33.

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

Faulkner, William

34.

To use books rightly, is to go to them for help; to appeal to them when our own knowledge and power fail; to be led by them into wider sight and purer conception than our own, and to receive from them the united sentence of the judges and councils of all time, against our solitary and unstable opinions.

Ruskin, John

35.

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

Chesterton, Gilbert K.

36.

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

37.

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

38.

Every abridgement of a good book is a fool abridged.

Montaigne, Michel Eyquem De

39.

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

40.

Books constitute capital. A library book lasts as long as a house, for hundreds of years. It is not, then, an article of mere consumption but fairly of capital, and often in the case of professional men, setting out in life, it is their only capital.

Jefferson, Thomas

41.

No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader.

Frost, Robert

42.

The book you don't read won't help.

Rohn, Jim

43.

We ought to reverence books; to look on them as useful and mighty things. If they are good and true, whether they are about religion, politics, farming, trade, law, or medicine, they are the message of Christ, the maker of all things -- the teacher of all truth.

Kingsley, Charles

44.

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

45.

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

46.

Everything you need for better future and success has already been written. And guess what? All you have to do is go to the library.

Rohn, Jim

47.

Ideally a book would have no order to it, and the reader would have to discover his own.

Vaneigem, Raoul

48.

A multitude of books distracts the mind.

Socrates

49.

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

50.

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