Motivational Quotes

Books - reading

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

- Whitman, Walt

Best Quotes about Books - reading

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

Everything in the world exists to end up in a book.

Mallarme, Stephane

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

Critchfield, Jim

Beware of the person of one book.

Aquinas, St. Thomas

Who kills a man kills a reasonable creature, God's image, but thee who destroys a good book, kills reason itself.

Milton, John

Books are not men and yet they stay alive.

Benet, Stephen Vincent

The tools I need for my work are paper, tobacco, food, and a little whiskey.

Faulkner, William

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

Lee, Spike

Books are the blessed chloroform of the mind.

Chambers, Robert

10.

A successful book cannot afford to be more than ten percent new.

Mcluhan, Marshall

11.

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

Lowell, James Russell

12.

A multitude of books distracts the mind.

Socrates

13.

Ideally a book would have no order to it, and the reader would have to discover his own.

Vaneigem, Raoul

14.

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

Schopenhauer, Arthur

15.

She could give herself up to the written word as naturally as a good dancer to music or a fine swimmer to water. The only difficulty was that after finishing the last sentence she was left with a feeling at once hollow and uncomfortably full. Exactly like indigestion.

Rhys, Jean

16.

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

17.

Fiction reveals truth that reality obscures.

West, Jessamyn

18.

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

Blackie, Professor

19.

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

Maugham, W. Somerset

20.

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

Hunt, Leigh

21.

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

Lawrence, D. H.

22.

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

23.

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

Gibbon, Edward

24.

The books that everybody admires are those that nobody reads.

France, Anatole

25.

I suggest that the only books that influence us are those for which we are ready, and which have gone a little further down our particular path than we have yet got ourselves.

Forster, Edward M.

26.

A good title is the title of a successful book.

Chandler, Raymond

27.

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

28.

What gunpowder did for war the printing press has done for the mind.

Phillips, Wendell

29.

A bibliophile of little means is likely to suffer often. Books don't slip from his hands but fly past him through the air, high as birds, high as prices.

Neruda, Pablo

30.

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

31.

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.

32.

Early in the morning, at break of day, in all the freshness and dawn of one's strength, to read a book --I call that vicious!

Nietzsche, Friedrich

33.

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

34.

The book you don't read won't help.

Rohn, Jim

35.

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

Montagu, Lady Mary Wortley

36.

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

37.

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

38.

I've never know any trouble than an hour's reading didn't assuage.

Secondat, Charles de

39.

What we become depends on what we read after all the professors have finished with us. The greatest university of all is the collection of books.

Carlyle, Thomas

40.

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

Murray, William

41.

To read well, that is, to read true books in a true spirit, is a noble exercise, and one that will task the reader more than any other exercise which the customs of the day esteem. It requires a training such as the athletes underwent, the steady intention almost of the whole life to this object.

Thoreau, Henry David

42.

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

43.

To feel most beautifully alive means to be reading something beautiful, ready always to apprehend in the flow of language the sudden flash of poetry.

Bachelard, Gaston

44.

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

45.

One half who graduate from college never read another book.

True, Herbert

46.

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.

47.

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

Locke, John

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.

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

50.

The only books that influence us are those for which we are ready, and which have gone a little farther down our particular path than we have yet got ourselves.

Forster, Edward M.