Motivational Quotes

Books - reading

Fiction reveals truth that reality obscures.

- West, Jessamyn

Best Quotes about Books - reading

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

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

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

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

Everything in this book may be wrong. [The Savior's Manual]

Bach, Richard

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

Proverb, American

A book that is shut is but a block.

Fuller, Thomas

I always begin at the left with the opening word of the sentence and read toward the right and I recommend this method.

Thurber, James

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

10.

The chief knowledge that a man gets from reading books is the knowledge that very few of them are worth reading.

Mencken, H. L.

11.

Books are but waste paper unless we spend in action the wisdom we get from thought -- asleep. When we are weary of the living, we may repair to the dead, who have nothing of peevishness, pride, or design in their conversation.

Collier, Jeremy

12.

With one day's reading a man may have the key in his hands.

Pound, Ezra

13.

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

Howells, William Dean

14.

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

15.

One always tends to overpraise a long book, because one has got through it.

Forster, Edward M.

16.

Don't ask me who's influenced me. A lion is made up of the lambs he's digested, and I've been reading all my life.

Seferis, Giorgos

17.

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

Chamfort, Sebastien-Roch Nicolas De

18.

One sheds one's sicknesses in books -- repeats and presents again one's emotions, to be master of them.

Lawrence, D. H.

19.

In the dark colony of night, when I consider man's magnificent capacity for malice, madness, folly, envy, rage, and destructiveness, and I wonder whether we shall not end up as breakfast for newts and polyps, I seem to hear the muffled cries of all the words in all the books with covers closed.

Rosten, Leo

20.

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

Asimov, Isaac

21.

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

Frost, Robert

22.

We should be as careful of the books we read, as of the company we keep. The dead very often have more power than the living.

Edwards, Tryon

23.

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

Jackson, Holbrook

24.

'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

25.

It is from books that wise people derive consolation in the troubles of life.

Hugo, Victor

26.

Hypocrite reader -- my fellow -- my brother!

Baudelaire, Charles

27.

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

Spielberg, Steven

28.

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

Marcel, Anthony

29.

All good books are alike in that they are truer than if they had really happened and after you are finished reading one you will feel that all that happened to you and afterwards it all belongs to you; the good and the bad, the ecstasy, the remorse, and sorrow, the people and the places and how the weather was.

Hemingway, Ernest

30.

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

31.

To sit alone in the lamplight with a book spread out before you hold intimate converse with men of unseen generations -- such is pleasure beyond compare.

Kenko, Yoshida

32.

Books are standing counselors and preachers, always at hand, and always disinterested; having this advantage over oral instructors, that they are ready to repeat their lesson as often as we please.

Chambers, Oswald

33.

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

34.

Reading a book is like re-writing it for yourself. You bring to a novel, anything you read, all your experience of the world. You bring your history and you read it in your own terms.

Carter, Angela

35.

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

Montagu, Lady Mary Wortley

36.

A bad book is as much of a labor to write as a good one; it comes as sincerely from the author's soul.

Huxley, Aldous

37.

A good book is the very essence of a good man. His virtues survive in it, while the foibles and faults of his actual life are forgotten. All the goodly company of the excellent and great sit around my table, or look down on me from yonder shelves, waiting patiently to answer my questions and enrich me with their wisdom. A precious book is a foretaste of immortality.

Cuyler, Theodore L.

38.

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

39.

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.

40.

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

Butler, Samuel

41.

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

Rohn, Jim

42.

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

Disraeli, Benjamin

43.

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