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

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.

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

Holmes, Oliver Wendell

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

Kempis, Thomas

The books that everybody admires are those that nobody reads.

France, Anatole

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

Mencken, H. L.

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

Pound, Ezra

A person who publishes a book appears willfully in public with his pants down.

Millay, Edna St. Vincent

Beware of the person of one book.

Aquinas, St. Thomas

The age of the book is almost gone.

Steiner, George

10.

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

Maugham, W. Somerset

11.

The Brahmins say that in their books there are many predictions of times in which it will rain. But press those books as strongly as you can, you can not get out of them a drop of water. So you can not get out of all the books that contain the best precepts the smallest good deed.

Tolstoy, Count Leo

12.

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

13.

Next, in importance to books are their titles.

Davies, Paul

14.

I am a part of everything that I have read.

Kieran, John

15.

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

Jackson, Holbrook

16.

A book is a part of life, a manifestation of life, just as much as a tree or a horse or a star. It obeys its own rhythms, its own laws, whether it be a novel, a play, or a diary. The deep, hidden rhythm of life is always there -- that of the pulse, the heart beat.

Miller, Henry

17.

The multitude of books is a great evil. There is no limit to this fever for writing.

Luther, Martin

18.

This book is not to be tossed lightly aside, but to be hurled with great force.

Parker, Dorothy

19.

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

20.

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

21.

Books are lighthouses erected in the great sea of time.

Whipple, Edwin P.

22.

A good book, in the language of the book-sellers, is a salable one; in that of the curious, a scarce one; in that of men of sense, a useful and instructive one.

Chambers, Oswald

23.

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.

24.

The pleasure of reading is doubled when one lives with another who shares the same books.

Mansfield, Katherine

25.

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''

26.

You will, I am sure, agree with me that... if page 534 only finds us in the second chapter, the length of the first one must have been really intolerable.

Doyle, Sir Arthur Conan

27.

What is the most precious, the most exciting smell awaiting you in the house when you return to it after a dozen years or so? The smell of roses, you think? No, moldering books.

Sinyavsky, Andre

28.

When I am dead, I hope it may be said: His sins were scarlet, but his books were read.

Belloc, Hilaire

29.

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

Wilde, Oscar

30.

Books are not men and yet they stay alive.

Benet, Stephen Vincent

31.

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

Schopenhauer, Arthur

32.

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

33.

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

34.

Books succeed, and lives fail.

Browning, Elizabeth Barrett

35.

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

Howells, William Dean

36.

An empty book is like an infant's soul, in which anything may be written. It is capable of all things, but containeth nothing. I have a mind to fill this with profitable wonders.

Traherne, Thomas

37.

Hypocrite reader -- my fellow -- my brother!

Baudelaire, Charles

38.

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

Gibbon, Edward

39.

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

Mcluhan, Marshall

40.

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

41.

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

42.

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

Fuller, Margaret

43.

In the dark colony of night, when I consider man's magnificent capacity for malice, madness, folly, envy, rage, and destructiveness, and I wonder whether we shall not end up as breakfast for newts and polyps, I seem to hear the muffled cries of all the words in all the books with covers closed.

Rosten, Leo

44.

The world may be full of fourth-rate writers but it's also full of fourth-rate readers.

Barstow, Stan

45.

There was a time when the world acted on books; now books act on the world.

Joubert, Joseph

46.

The good of a book lies in its being read. A book is made up of signs that speak of other signs, which in their turn speak of things. Without an eye to read them, a book contains signs that produce no concepts; therefore it is dumb.

Eco, Umberto

47.

A book is like a man -- clever and dull, brave and cowardly, beautiful and ugly. For every flowering thought there will be a page like a wet and mangy mongrel, and for every looping flight a tap on the wing and a reminder that wax cannot hold the feathers firm too near the sun.

Steinbeck, John

48.

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

49.

All my good reading, you might say, was done in the toilet. There are passages in Ulysses which can be read only in the toilet -- if one wants to extract the full flavor of their content.

Miller, Henry

50.

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