Motivational Quotes

Books - reading

Fiction reveals truth that reality obscures.

- West, Jessamyn

Best Quotes about Books - reading

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

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

Critchfield, Jim

There is no robber worse than a bad book.

Proverb, Italian

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

Every abridgement of a good book is a fool abridged.

Montaigne, Michel Eyquem De

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

Hope, Anthony

He that loves a book will never want a faithful friend, a wholesome counselor, a cheerful companion, an effectual comforter. By study, by reading, by thinking, one may innocently divert and pleasantly entertain himself, as in all weathers, as in all fortunes.

Barrow

Books are those faithful mirrors that reflect to our mind the minds of sages and heroes.

Gibbon, Edward

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

10.

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

11.

I feel like I'm drowning. Every night, I'm carrying home loads of things to read but I'm too exhausted. I keep clipping things and Xeroxing them and planning to read them eventually, but I just end up throwing it all away and feeling guilty.

Levine, Ghita

12.

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

13.

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

Lee, Harper

14.

Without books the development of civilization would have been impossible. They are the engines of change, windows on the world, Lighthouses as the poet said erected in the sea of time. They are companions, teachers, magicians, bankers of the treasures of the mind, Books are humanity in print.

Schopenhauer, Arthur

15.

Books are the blessed chloroform of the mind.

Chambers, Robert

16.

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

17.

Every man is a volume if you know how to read him.

Channing, William Ellery

18.

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

Brown, Les

19.

Happy is he who has laid up in his youth, and held fast in all fortune, a genuine and passionate love for reading.

Choate, Rufus

20.

You can either read something many times in order to be assured that you got it all, or else you can define your purpose and use techniques which will assure that you have met it and gotten what you need.

Kump, Peter

21.

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

22.

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

23.

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

Mccay, James T.

24.

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

25.

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

26.

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

Lowell, James Russell

27.

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

28.

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

29.

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

Bach, Richard

30.

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

31.

Fiction reveals truth that reality obscures.

West, Jessamyn

32.

The world may be full of fourth-rate writers but it's also full of fourth-rate readers.

Barstow, Stan

33.

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

Shaw, George Bernard

34.

The Bible remained for me a book of books, still divine -- but divine in the sense that all great books are divine which teach men how to live righteously.

Keith, Sir Arthur

35.

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

36.

The flood of print has turned reading into a process of gulping rather than savoring

Chappell, Warren

37.

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

Mencken, H. L.

38.

Books succeed, and lives fail.

Browning, Elizabeth Barrett

39.

Read nothing that you do not care to remember, and remember nothing you do not mean to use.

Blackie, Professor

40.

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

41.

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

42.

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

43.

No furniture is so charming as books.

Smith, Sydney

44.

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

Pound, Ezra

45.

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

46.

You've really got to start hitting the books because it's no joke out here.

Lee, Spike

47.

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

48.

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

49.

A house is not a home unless it contains food and fire for the mind as well as the body.

Fuller, Margaret

50.

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

Hunt, Leigh