Motivational Quotes

Books - reading

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

- Wilde, Oscar

Best Quotes about Books - reading

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

Hunt, Leigh

When I get a little money, I buy books; and if any is left I buy food and clothes.

Erasmus, Desiderius

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

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

Faulkner, William

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

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

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

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.

Reading makes immigrants of us all. It takes us away from home, but more important, it finds homes for us everywhere.

Rochman, Hazel

10.

Old books, you know well, are books of the world's youth, and new books are the fruits of its age.

Holmes, Oliver Wendell

11.

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

12.

The world of books is the most remarkable creation of man nothing else that he builds ever lasts monuments fall; nations perish; civilization grow old and die out; new races build others. But in the world of books are volumes that have seen this happen again and again and yet live on. Still young, still as fresh as the day they were written, still telling men's hearts, of the hearts of men centuries dead.

Day, Clarence

13.

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

14.

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

Vaneigem, Raoul

15.

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

Chesterton, Gilbert K.

16.

The good parts of a book may be only something a writer is lucky enough to overhear or it may be the wreck of his whole damn life --and one is as good as the other.

Hemingway, Ernest

17.

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

Twain, Mark

18.

My early and invincible love of reading I would not exchange for all the riches of India.

Gibbon, Edward

19.

The most foolish kind of a book is a kind of leaky boat on the sea of wisdom; some of the wisdom will get in anyhow.

Holmes, Oliver Wendell

20.

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

Murray, William

21.

There is no robber worse than a bad book.

Proverb, Italian

22.

After all, the world is not a stage -- not to me: nor a theatre: nor a show-house of any sort. And art, especially novels, are not little theatres where the reader sits aloft and watches... and sighs, commiserates, condones and smiles. That's what you want a book to be: because it leaves you so safe and superior, with your two-dollar ticket to the show. And that's what my books are not and never will be. Whoever reads me will be in the thick of the scrimmage, and if he doesn't like it -- if he wants a safe seat in the audience -- let him read someone else.

Lawrence, D. H.

23.

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

Whitman, Walt

24.

Americans will listen, but they do not care to read. War and Peace must wait for the leisure of retirement, which never really comes: meanwhile it helps to furnish the living room. Blockbusting fiction is bought as furniture. Unread, it maintains its value. Read, it looks like money wasted. Cunningly, Americans know that books contain a person, and they want the person, not the book.

Burgess, Anthony

25.

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

26.

There is creative reading as well as creative writing.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

27.

Books succeed, and lives fail.

Browning, Elizabeth Barrett

28.

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

Forster, Edward M.

29.

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

30.

When you reread a classic, you do not see more in the book than you did before; you see more in you than there was before.

Fadiman, Clifton

31.

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

32.

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.

33.

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

Pound, Ezra

34.

Here, my dear Lucy, hide these books. Quick, quick! Fling Peregrine Pickle under the toilette --throw Roderick Random into the closet --put The Innocent Adultery into The Whole Duty of Man; thrust Lord Aimworth under the sofa! cram Ovid behind the bolster; there --put The Man of Feeling into your pocket. Now for them.

Sheridan, Richard Brinsley

35.

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

Wycherley, William

36.

Fiction reveals truth that reality obscures.

West, Jessamyn

37.

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

Bach, Richard

38.

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

Gibbon, Edward

39.

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

40.

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.

41.

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

Asimov, Isaac

42.

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

Lowell, James Russell

43.

A good title is the title of a successful book.

Chandler, Raymond

44.

All the known world, excepting only savage nations, is governed by books.

Voltaire

45.

To use books rightly, is to go to them for help; to appeal to them when our own knowledge and power fail; to be led by them into wider sight and purer conception than our own, and to receive from them the united sentence of the judges and councils of all time, against our solitary and unstable opinions.

Ruskin, John

46.

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

47.

I always begin at the left with the opening word of the sentence and read toward the right and I recommend this method.

Thurber, James

48.

Reading the Scriptures is an uplifting experience.

49.

Books and marriage go ill together.

Moliere

50.

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

Howells, William Dean