Motivational Quotes

Books - reading

Fiction reveals truth that reality obscures.

- West, Jessamyn

Best Quotes about Books - reading

Who ever converses among old books will be hard to please among the new.

Temple, Sir William

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

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

Miss a meal if you have to, but don't miss a book.

Rohn, Jim

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

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

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

Lowell, James Russell

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

Mccay, James T.

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

10.

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

11.

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

12.

The pleasure of reading is doubled when one lives with another who shares the same books.

Mansfield, Katherine

13.

Today a reader, tomorrow a leader.

Fusselman, W.

14.

The words of my book nothing, the drift of it everything.

Whitman, Walt

15.

No furniture is so charming as books.

Smith, Sydney

16.

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

Lichtenberg, Georg C.

17.

A dose of poison can do its work but once. A bad book can go on poisoning minds for generations.

Murray, William

18.

The books we think we ought to read are poky, dull, and dry; The books that we would like to read we are ashamed to buy; The books that people talk about we never can recall; And the books that people give us, oh, they're the worst of all.

Wells, Carolyn

19.

What is a diary as a rule? A document useful to the person who keeps it. Dull to the contemporary who reads it and invaluable to the student, centuries afterwards, who treasures it.

Terry, Helen

20.

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

21.

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

22.

The books one reads in childhood, and perhaps most of all the bad and good bad books, create in one's mind a sort of false map of the world, a series of fabulous countries into which one can retreat at odd moments throughout the rest of life, and which in some cases can survive a visit to the real countries which they are supposed to represent.

Orwell, George

23.

Book love... is your pass to the greatest, the purest, and the most perfect pleasure that God has prepared for His creatures.

Trollope, Anthony

24.

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

Carey, Joyce

25.

The classics are only primitive literature. They belong to the same class as primitive machinery and primitive music and primitive medicine.

Leacock, Stephen B.

26.

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

27.

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

Disraeli, Benjamin

28.

What is reading, but silent conversation.

Landor, Walter Savage

29.

This book is not to be tossed lightly aside, but to be hurled with great force.

Parker, Dorothy

30.

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

Lee, Spike

31.

The Brahmins say that in their books there are many predictions of times in which it will rain. But press those books as strongly as you can, you can not get out of them a drop of water. So you can not get out of all the books that contain the best precepts the smallest good deed.

Tolstoy, Count Leo

32.

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

33.

The newest books are those that never grow old.

Jackson, George Holbrook

34.

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.

35.

Books and marriage go ill together.

Moliere

36.

There are people who read too much: bibliobibuli. I know some who are constantly drunk on books, as other men are drunk on whiskey or religion. They wander through this most diverting and stimulating of worlds in a haze, seeing nothing and hearing nothing.

Mencken, H. L.

37.

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

Wycherley, William

38.

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

Marcel, Anthony

39.

The great American novel has not only already been written, it has already been rejected.

Dane, Frank

40.

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

Bevan, Aneurin

41.

A book worth reading is worth buying.

Ruskin, John

42.

The power of a text is different when it is read from when it is copied out. Only the copied text thus commands the soul of him who is occupied with it, whereas the mere reader never discovers the new aspects of his inner self that are opened by the text, that road cut through the interior jungle forever closing behind it: because the reader follows the movement of his mind in the free flight of day-dreaming, whereas the copier submits it to command.

Benjamin, Walter

43.

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

44.

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

Mencken, H. L.

45.

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

Butler, Samuel

46.

Fiction reveals truth that reality obscures.

West, Jessamyn

47.

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

Mencken, H. L.

48.

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

49.

Books give not wisdom where none was before. But where some is, there reading makes it more.

Harington, John

50.

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

Phelps, William Lyon