Motivational Quotes

Books - reading

Books are lighthouses erected in the great sea of time.

- Whipple, Edwin P.

Best Quotes about Books - reading

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

Frost, Robert

I would sooner read a timetable or a catalog than nothing at all.

Maugham, W. Somerset

Reading the Scriptures is an uplifting experience.

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

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

Ruskin, John

I don't think any good book is based on factual experience. Bad books are about things the writer already knew before he wrote them.

Fuentes, Carlos

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

Belloc, Hilaire

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

For a good book has this quality, that it is not merely a petrifaction of its author, but that once it has been tossed behind, like Deucalion's little stone, it acquires a separate and vivid life of its own.

Lejeune, Caroline

10.

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

11.

The good of a book lies in its being read. A book is made up of signs that speak of other signs, which in their turn speak of things. Without an eye to read them, a book contains signs that produce no concepts; therefore it is dumb.

Eco, Umberto

12.

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

13.

In science, read by preference the newest works. In literature, read the oldest. The classics are always modern.

Lytton, Lord Edward

14.

A novel is a mirror carried along a main road.

Stendhal, Henri B.

15.

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

16.

Fiction reveals truth that reality obscures.

West, Jessamyn

17.

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

18.

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

Adler, Mortimer J.

19.

Those who do not read are no better off than those who cannot read.

20.

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

Brown, Les

21.

To read too many books is harmful.

Zedong, Mao

22.

Reading furnishes the mind only with material for knowledge; it is thinking that makes what we read ours.

Locke, John

23.

Learning to read has been reduced to a process of mastering a series of narrow, specific, hierarchical skills. Where armed-forces recruits learn the components of a rifle or the intricacies of close order drill by the numbers, recruits to reading learn its mechanics sound by sound and word by word.

Gross, Jacquelyn

24.

If a secret history of books could be written, and the author's private thoughts and meanings noted down alongside of his story, how many insipid volumes would become interesting, and dull tales excite the reader!

Thackeray, William M.

25.

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

Shaw, George Bernard

26.

Hypocrite reader -- my fellow -- my brother!

Baudelaire, Charles

27.

The age of the book is almost gone.

Steiner, George

28.

The books we read should be chosen with great care, that they may be, as an Egyptian king wrote over his library, The medicines of the soul.

Hood, Paxton

29.

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.

30.

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

Marcel, Anthony

31.

Books, like friends, should be few and well chosen. Like friends, too, we should return to them again and again for, like true friends, they will never fail us -- never cease to instruct -- never cloy.

Colton, Charles Caleb

32.

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

Harington, John

33.

To buy books would be a good thing if we also could buy the time to read them.

Schopenhauer, Arthur

34.

Some of the most famous books are the least worth reading. Their fame was due to their having done something that needed to be doing in their day. The work is done and the virtue of the book has expired.

Morely, John

35.

The reading or non-reading a book will never keep down a single petticoat.

Byron, Lord

36.

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

Fuller, Margaret

37.

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''

38.

Do we write books so that they shall merely be read? Don't we also write them for employment in the household? For one that is read from start to finish, thousands are leafed through, other thousands lie motionless, others are jammed against mouseholes, thrown at rats, others are stood on, sat on, drummed on, have gingerbread baked on them or are used to light pipes.

Lichtenberg, Georg C.

39.

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

Forster, Edward M.

40.

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

41.

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

42.

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

43.

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

Channing, William Ellery

44.

This is not a book. This is libel, slander, defamation of character. This is not a book, in the ordinary sense of the word. No, this is a prolonged insult, a gob of spit in the face of Art, a kick in the pants to God, Man, Destiny, Time, Love, Beauty... what you will. I am going to sing for you, a little off key perhaps, but I will sing.

Miller, Henry

45.

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

46.

No one can read with profit that which he cannot learn to read with pleasure.

Porter, Noah

47.

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

Howells, William Dean

48.

No matter how busy you may think you are, you must find time for reading, or surrender yourself to self-chosen ignorance.

Townsend, Atwood H.

49.

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

50.

A person who publishes a book appears willfully in public with his pants down.

Millay, Edna St. Vincent