Motivational Quotes

Books - reading

The reason a writer writes a book is to forget a book and the reason a reader reads one is to remember it.

- Wolfe, Thomas

Best Quotes about Books - reading

Next to acquiring good friends, the best acquisition is that of good books.

Colton, Charles Caleb

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

Lytton, Lord Edward

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

Fuller, Margaret

What is reading, but silent conversation.

Landor, Walter Savage

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

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

Hugo, Victor

There is no robber worse than a bad book.

Proverb, Italian

Read as you taste fruit or savor wine, or enjoy friendship, love or life.

Jackson, Holbrook

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

10.

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

11.

The great American novel has not only already been written, it has already been rejected.

Dane, Frank

12.

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

13.

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

14.

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

15.

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.

16.

A bad book is the worse that it cannot repent. It has not been the devil's policy to keep the masses of mankind in ignorance; but finding that they will read, he is doing all in his power to poison their books.

Kirk, E.N.

17.

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

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.

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

Mcluhan, Marshall

20.

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

21.

Books are the blessed chloroform of the mind.

Chambers, Robert

22.

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

Pound, Ezra

23.

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

Secondat, Charles de

24.

My books kept me from the ring, the dog-pit, the tavern, and the saloon.

Hood, Thomas

25.

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

26.

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

Gibbon, Edward

27.

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

28.

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

Tupper, Martin

29.

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

30.

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

31.

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

32.

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

Adler, Mortimer J.

33.

The book to read is not the one which thinks for you, but the one which makes you think. No book in the world equals the Bible for that.

Mccosh

34.

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

Bevan, Aneurin

35.

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

Hunt, Leigh

36.

There are two kinds of books. Those that no one reads and those that no one ought to read.

Mencken, H. L.

37.

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

38.

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

Marcel, Anthony

39.

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

40.

The failure to read good books both enfeebles the vision and strengthens our most fatal tendency --the belief that the here and now is all there is.

Bloom, Allan

41.

Beware you be not swallowed up in books! An ounce of love is worth a pound of knowledge.

Wesley, John

42.

Everywhere I have sought rest and not found it, except sitting in a corner by myself with a little book.

Kempis, Thomas

43.

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

44.

Book love... is your pass to the greatest, the purest, and the most perfect pleasure that God has prepared for His creatures.

Trollope, Anthony

45.

I feel like I'm drowning. Every night, I'm carrying home loads of things to read but I'm too exhausted. I keep clipping things and Xeroxing them and planning to read them eventually, but I just end up throwing it all away and feeling guilty.

Levine, Ghita

46.

I am what libraries and librarians have made me, with little assistance from a professor of Greek and poets.

Sandwell, B. K.

47.

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

48.

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

Spielberg, Steven

49.

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

Locke, John

50.

Books and marriage go ill together.

Moliere