Motivational Quotes

Books - reading

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

- Whitman, Walt

Best Quotes about Books - reading

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

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

Lee, Spike

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

The man who does not read books has no advantage over the man that can not read them.

Twain, Mark

My books are water; those of the great geniuses are wine -- everybody drinks water.

Twain, Mark

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

Lowell, James Russell

The books that the world calls immoral are the books that show the world its own shame.

Wilde, Oscar

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

A novel is never anything, but a philosophy put into images.

Camus, Albert

10.

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

11.

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

Lee, Harper

12.

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

Pound, Ezra

13.

Reading is equivalent to thinking with someone else's head instead of with one's own.

Schopenhauer, Arthur

14.

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

Asimov, Isaac

15.

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

16.

In the case of good books, the point is not how many of them you can get through, but rather how many can get through to you.

Adler, Mortimer J.

17.

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

18.

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

Howells, William Dean

19.

The printing press is either the greatest blessing or the greatest curse of modern times, sometimes one forgets which it is.

Barrie, Sir James M.

20.

Very young children eat their books, literally devouring their contents. This is one reason for the scarcity of first editions of Alice in Wonderland and other favorites of the nursery.

Rosenbach, A. S. W.

21.

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

22.

A library is thought in cold storage.

Samuel, Herbert

23.

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

24.

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

Leacock, Stephen B.

25.

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

Millay, Edna St. Vincent

26.

He had read much, if one considers his long life; but his contemplation was much more than his reading. He was wont to say that if he had read as much as other men he should have known no more than other men.

Aubrey, John

27.

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

28.

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.

29.

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

30.

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

Forster, Edward M.

31.

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

Critchfield, Jim

32.

In any situation, ask yourself: What strengths do I possess that can contribute towards accomplishing something in this situation? Then follow through.

33.

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

34.

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

Mccay, James T.

35.

No furniture is so charming as books.

Smith, Sydney

36.

The mere brute pleasure of reading --the sort of pleasure a cow must have in grazing.

Chesterton, Gilbert K.

37.

The things I want to know are in books; my best friend is the man who'll get me a book I ain't read.

Lincoln, Abraham

38.

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

Bach, Richard

39.

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

40.

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

Maugham, W. Somerset

41.

A good book, in the language of the book-sellers, is a salable one; in that of the curious, a scarce one; in that of men of sense, a useful and instructive one.

Chambers, Oswald

42.

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

43.

One half who graduate from college never read another book.

True, Herbert

44.

We are too civil to books. For a few golden sentences we will turn over and actually read a volume of four or five hundred pages.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

45.

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

46.

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

47.

Today a reader, tomorrow a leader.

Fusselman, W.

48.

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

49.

No story is the same to us after a lapse of time; or rather we who read it are no longer the same interpreters.

Eliot, George

50.

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