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

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

Don't ask me who's influenced me. A lion is made up of the lambs he's digested, and I've been reading all my life.

Seferis, Giorgos

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

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

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

Wesley, John

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

Camus, Albert

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.

The books we read should be chosen with great care, that they may be, as an Egyptian king wrote over his library, The medicines of the soul.

Hood, Paxton

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

Blackie, Professor

10.

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

11.

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

Milton, John

12.

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

Butler, Samuel

13.

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

Twain, Mark

14.

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

15.

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

Bach, Richard

16.

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

Mallarme, Stephane

17.

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

Colton, Charles Caleb

18.

Miss a meal if you have to, but don't miss a book.

Rohn, Jim

19.

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

Voltaire

20.

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

21.

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

22.

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

23.

Happy is he who has laid up in his youth, and held fast in all fortune, a genuine and passionate love for reading.

Choate, Rufus

24.

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

Schopenhauer, Arthur

25.

Our high respect for a well read person is praise enough for literature.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

26.

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

27.

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

28.

How can you dare teach a man to read until you've taught him everything else first?

Shaw, George Bernard

29.

It does not follow because many books are written by persons born in America that there exists an American literature. Books which imitate or represent the thoughts and life of Europe do not constitute an American literature. Before such can exist, an original idea must animate this nation and fresh currents of life must call into life fresh thoughts along the shore.

Fuller, Margaret

30.

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

31.

Books had instant replay long before televised sports.

Williams, Bert

32.

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

33.

A book worth reading is worth buying.

Ruskin, John

34.

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

35.

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

Brookner, Anita

36.

A real book is not one that we read, but one that reads us.

Auden, W. H.

37.

A book might be written on the injustice of the just.

Hope, Anthony

38.

There is creative reading as well as creative writing.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

39.

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

Porter, Noah

40.

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

Lytton, Lord Edward

41.

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.

42.

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

43.

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

Mcluhan, Marshall

44.

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

Whitman, Walt

45.

Beware of the person of one book.

Aquinas, St. Thomas

46.

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

47.

There are books so alive that you're always afraid that while you weren't reading, the book has gone and changed, has shifted like a river; while you went on living, it went on living too, and like a river moved on and moved away. No one has stepped twice into the same river. But did anyone ever step twice into the same book?

Tsvetaeva, Marina

48.

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

49.

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

50.

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

Locke, John