Motivational Quotes

Books - reading

There is no such thing as a moral book or an immoral book. Books are well written or badly written. That is all.

- Wilde, Oscar

Best Quotes about Books - reading

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

Beware of the person of one book.

Aquinas, St. Thomas

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

When the book comes out it may hurt you -- but in order for me to do it, it had to hurt me first. I can only tell you about yourself as much as I can face about myself.

Baldwin, James

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

Erasmus, Desiderius

Fiction reveals truth that reality obscures.

West, Jessamyn

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

Lee, Spike

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

A library is thought in cold storage.

Samuel, Herbert

10.

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

Bevan, Aneurin

11.

From the moment I picked your book up until I laid it down I was convulsed with laughter. Some day I intend reading it.

Marx, Groucho

12.

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

Mccay, James T.

13.

Everything you need for better future and success has already been written. And guess what? All you have to do is go to the library.

Rohn, Jim

14.

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

15.

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

Butler, Samuel

16.

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

Byron, Lord

17.

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

Leacock, Stephen B.

18.

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.

19.

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.

20.

Books are not men and yet they stay alive.

Benet, Stephen Vincent

21.

The lessons taught in great books are misleading. The commerce in life is rarely so simple and never so just.

Brookner, Anita

22.

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

23.

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

Harington, John

24.

The books that everybody admires are those that nobody reads.

France, Anatole

25.

The last thing one discovers in composing a work is what to put first.

Pascal, Blaise

26.

To learn to read is to light a fire; every syllable that is spelled out is a spark.

Hugo, Victor

27.

The constant habit of perusing devout books is so indispensable, that it has been termed the oil of the lamp of prayer. Too much reading, however, and too little meditation, may produce the effect of a lamp inverted; which is extinguished by the very excess of that ailment, whose property is to feed it.

More, Hannah

28.

Five daily newspapers arrive in my California driveway. The New York times and the Wall Street Journal are supplemented by three local papers. As for magazines, I read, or at least skim, Business Week, Forbes, The Economist, INC; Industry Week, Fortune. Other subscriptions include Sales and Marketing Management, Modern Health Care, Progressive Grocer, High Tech Business, and Slaon Management Review from MIT. I religiously read Business Tokyo, Asia Week, and Far Eastern Economic Review. I glance at Newsweek and Time ... but I devour the New Republic, Policy Review, Foreign Affairs, The Washington Monthly, and Public Interest. How about books? A dozen or more each month.

Peters, Thomas J.

29.

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

30.

As writers become more numerous, it is natural for readers to become more indolent; whence must necessarily arise a desire of attaining knowledge with the greatest possible ease.

Goldsmith, Oliver

31.

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

Rohn, Jim

32.

A book may be compared to your neighbor: if it be good, it cannot last too long; if bad, you cannot get rid of it too early.

Brooke, Rupert

33.

A good book is the best of friends, the same today and for ever.

Tupper, Martin

34.

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

Phillips, Wendell

35.

What is reading, but silent conversation.

Landor, Walter Savage

36.

Only a generation of readers will span a generation of writers.

Spielberg, Steven

37.

There is a set of religious, or rather moral, writings which teach that virtue is the certain road to happiness, and vice to misery in this world. A very wholesome and comfortable doctrine, and to which we have but one objection, namely, that it is not true.

Fielding, Henry

38.

He has only half learned the art of reading who has not added to it the more refined art of skipping and skimming.

Balfour, Arthur James

39.

In science read the newest works, in literature read the oldest.

Bulwer-Lytton, Edward G.

40.

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

41.

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''

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.

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

44.

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.

45.

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

Lowell, James Russell

46.

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

47.

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

Porter, Noah

48.

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

49.

Read good, big important things.

Noonan, Peggy

50.

'Tis the good reader that makes the good book; in every book he finds passages which seem to be confidences or sides hidden from all else and unmistakably meant for his ear; the profit of books is according to the sensibility of the reader; the profound thought or passion sleeps as in a mine, until it is discovered by an equal mind and heart.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo