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

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

You are wise, witty and wonderful, but you spend too much time reading this sort of stuff.

Critchfield, Jim

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

A good title is the title of a successful book.

Chandler, Raymond

Nine-tenths of the existing books are nonsense and the clever books are the refutation of that nonsense.

Disraeli, Benjamin

A man ought to read just as his inclination leads him; for what he reads as a task will do him little good.

Johnson, Samuel

Readers are plentiful: thinkers are rare.

Martineau, Harriet

Any book that helps a child to form a habit of reading, to make reading one of his deep and continuing needs, is good for him.

McKenna, Richard

The book salesman should be honored because he brings to our attention, as a rule, the very books we need most and neglect most.

Crane, Frank

10.

Reading the Scriptures is an uplifting experience.

11.

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.

12.

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

13.

Beware of the person of one book.

Aquinas, St. Thomas

14.

The printing press is either the greatest blessing or the greatest curse of modern times, sometimes one forgets which it is.

Barrie, Sir James M.

15.

There is no robber worse than a bad book.

Proverb, Italian

16.

Reading is to the mind what exercise is to the body. It is wholesome and bracing for the mind to have its faculties kept on the stretch.

Steele, Sir Richard

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.

Until it is kindled by a spirit as flamingly alive as the one which gave it birth a book is dead to us. Words divested of their magic are but dead hieroglyphs.

Miller, Henry

19.

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

20.

A book is a mirror: If an ass peers into it, you can't expect an apostle to look out.

Lichtenberg, Georg C.

21.

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

Howells, William Dean

22.

What is reading, but silent conversation.

Landor, Walter Savage

23.

You will find most books worth reading are worth reading twice.

Morely, John

24.

A novel points out that the world consists entirely of exceptions.

Carey, Joyce

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.

I used to walk to school with my nose buried in a book.

Coolio

27.

A house without books is like a room without windows. No man has a right to bring up his children without surrounding them with books, if he has the means to buy them. It is a wrong to his family. Children learn to read by being in the presence of books. The love of knowledge comes with reading and grows upon it. And the love of knowledge, in a young mind, is almost always a warrant against the inferior excitement of passions and vices.

Mann, Horace

28.

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

Belloc, Hilaire

29.

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

Asimov, Isaac

30.

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

Rochman, Hazel

31.

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

32.

A novel is a mirror carried along a main road.

Stendhal, Henri B.

33.

A novel must be exceptionally good to live as long as the average cat.

Maclennan, Hugh

34.

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.

35.

There are worse crimes than burning books. One of them is not reading them.

Brodsky, Joseph

36.

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

37.

A wicked book cannot repent.

Proverb

38.

One half who graduate from college never read another book.

True, Herbert

39.

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

Maugham, W. Somerset

40.

Books are but waste paper unless we spend in action the wisdom we get from thought -- asleep. When we are weary of the living, we may repair to the dead, who have nothing of peevishness, pride, or design in their conversation.

Collier, Jeremy

41.

I am a part of everything that I have read.

Kieran, John

42.

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

Chesterton, Gilbert K.

43.

I wish I could write a beautiful book to break those hearts that are soon to cease to exist: a book of faith and small neat worlds and of people who live by the philosophies of popular songs.

44.

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

Twain, Mark

45.

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

46.

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

Faulkner, William

47.

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

Lowell, James Russell

48.

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

49.

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

50.

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