Motivational Quotes

Books - reading

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

- Wesley, John

Best Quotes about Books - reading

If I had my way books would not be written in English, but in an exceedingly difficult secret language that only skilled professional readers and story-tellers could interpret. Then people like you would have to go to public halls and pay good prices to hear the professionals decode and read the books aloud for you. This plan would have the advantage of scaring off all amateur authors, retired politicians, country doctors and I-Married-a-Midget writers who would not have the patience to learn the secret language.

Davies, Robertson

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

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

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

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

Marcel, Anthony

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

Holmes, Oliver Wendell

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

Rohn, Jim

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

You should read books like you take medicine, by advice, and not by advertisement.

Ruskin, John

10.

What we become depends on what we read after all the professors have finished with us. The greatest university of all is the collection of books.

Carlyle, Thomas

11.

The unread story is not a story; it is little black marks on wood pulp. The reader, reading it, makes it live: a live thing, a story.

Guin, Ursula K. Le

12.

A novel points out that the world consists entirely of exceptions.

Carey, Joyce

13.

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

14.

You will be the same person in five as you are today except for the people you meet and the books you read.

Jones, Charles ''Tremendous''

15.

There is no robber worse than a bad book.

Proverb, Italian

16.

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

Maclennan, Hugh

17.

There are two kinds of books. Those that no one reads and those that no one ought to read.

Mencken, H. L.

18.

You will find most books worth reading are worth reading twice.

Morely, John

19.

I am a part of everything that I have read.

Kieran, John

20.

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

Bevan, Aneurin

21.

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

22.

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

Hubbard, Elbert

23.

God be thanked for books; they are the voices of the distant and the dead, and make us heirs of the spiritual life of past ages.

Channing, William Ellery

24.

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

25.

Begin to read a book that will help you move toward your dream.

Brown, Les

26.

Of all the ways of acquiring books, writing them oneself is regarded as the most praiseworthy method. Writers are really people who write books not because they are poor, but because they are dissatisfied with the books which they could buy but do not like.

Benjamin, Walter

27.

What gunpowder did for war the printing press has done for the mind.

Phillips, Wendell

28.

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

Wycherley, William

29.

The good parts of a book may be only something a writer is lucky enough to overhear or it may be the wreck of his whole damn life --and one is as good as the other.

Hemingway, Ernest

30.

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

Bulwer-Lytton, Edward G.

31.

An empty book is like an infant's soul, in which anything may be written. It is capable of all things, but containeth nothing. I have a mind to fill this with profitable wonders.

Traherne, Thomas

32.

When I am dead, I hope it may be said: His sins were scarlet, but his books were read.

Belloc, Hilaire

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.

I always like to look on the optimistic side of life, but I am realistic enough to know that life is a complex matter.

Disney, Walt

35.

Today a reader, tomorrow a leader.

Fusselman, W.

36.

When the book comes out it may hurt you -- but in order for me to do it, it had to hurt me first. I can only tell you about yourself as much as I can face about myself.

Baldwin, James

37.

Books are the best of things if well used; if abused, among the worst. They are good for nothing but to inspire. I had better never see a book than be warped by its attraction clean out of my own orbit, and made a satellite instead of a system.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

38.

Every abridgement of a good book is a fool abridged.

Montaigne, Michel Eyquem De

39.

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

Secondat, Charles de

40.

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

Brodsky, Joseph

41.

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

Coolio

42.

A book might be written on the injustice of the just.

Hope, Anthony

43.

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

Dawkins, John

44.

When we read a story, we inhabit it. The covers of the book are like a roof and four walls. What is to happen next will take place within the four walls of the story. And this is possible because the story's voice makes everything its own.

Berger, John

45.

There is more treasure in books than in all the pirates loot on Treasure Island and best of all, you can enjoy these riches every day of your life.

Disney, Walt

46.

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

47.

He has only half learned the art of reading who has not added to it the more refined art of skipping and skimming.

Balfour, Arthur James

48.

The book salesman should be honored because he brings to our attention, as a rule, the very books we need most and neglect most.

Crane, Frank

49.

There are books so alive that you're always afraid that while you weren't reading, the book has gone and changed, has shifted like a river; while you went on living, it went on living too, and like a river moved on and moved away. No one has stepped twice into the same river. But did anyone ever step twice into the same book?

Tsvetaeva, Marina

50.

Here, my dear Lucy, hide these books. Quick, quick! Fling Peregrine Pickle under the toilette --throw Roderick Random into the closet --put The Innocent Adultery into The Whole Duty of Man; thrust Lord Aimworth under the sofa! cram Ovid behind the bolster; there --put The Man of Feeling into your pocket. Now for them.

Sheridan, Richard Brinsley