Motivational Quotes

Books - reading

Somewhere, everywhere, now hidden, now apparent in what ever is written down, is the form of a human being. If we seek to know him, are we idly occupied?

- Woolf, Virginia

Best Quotes about Books - reading

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

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

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

Lichtenberg, Georg C.

A library is thought in cold storage.

Samuel, Herbert

You should read books like you take medicine, by advice, and not by advertisement.

Ruskin, John

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.

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

Phillips, Wendell

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

Sandwell, B. K.

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

10.

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

11.

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

Twain, Mark

12.

I know every book of mine by its smell, and I have but to put my nose between the pages to be reminded of all sorts of things.

Gissing, George Robert

13.

Books constitute capital. A library book lasts as long as a house, for hundreds of years. It is not, then, an article of mere consumption but fairly of capital, and often in the case of professional men, setting out in life, it is their only capital.

Jefferson, Thomas

14.

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

15.

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

16.

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

Mccay, James T.

17.

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

Wilde, Oscar

18.

The books one has written in the past have two surprises in store: one couldn't write them again, and wouldn't want to.

Rostand, Jean

19.

Old books that have ceased to be of service should no more be abandoned than should old friends who have ceased to give pleasure.

Worsthorne, Sir Peregrine

20.

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

Dane, Frank

21.

Today a reader, tomorrow a leader.

Fusselman, W.

22.

One half who graduate from college never read another book.

True, Herbert

23.

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

Joubert, Joseph

24.

The more sins you confess, the more books you will sell.

Proverb, American

25.

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

26.

'Tis pleasant, sure, to see one's name in print; A book's a book, although there's nothing in it.

Byron, Lord

27.

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

28.

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

29.

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

30.

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

31.

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

Schopenhauer, Arthur

32.

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

Jackson, Holbrook

33.

Until I feared I would lose it, I never loved to read. One does not love breathing.

Lee, Harper

34.

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

Whitman, Walt

35.

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

Pascal, Blaise

36.

Except a living man there is nothing more wonderful than a book! a message to us from the dead -- from human souls we never saw, who lived, perhaps, thousands of miles away. And yet these, in those little sheets of paper, speak to us, arouse us, terrify us, teach us, comfort us, open their hearts to us as brothers.

Kingsley, Charles

37.

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

38.

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

Marcel, Anthony

39.

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

Shaw, George Bernard

40.

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

Pound, Ezra

41.

There is creative reading as well as creative writing.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

42.

Read, read, read. Read everything-- trash, classics, good and bad, and see how they do it. Just like a carpenter who works as an apprentice and studies the master. Read! You'll absorb it. Then write. If it is good, you'll find out. If it's not, throw it out the window.

Faulkner, William

43.

With one day's reading a man may have the key in his hands.

Pound, Ezra

44.

Every man is a volume if you know how to read him.

Channing, William Ellery

45.

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

46.

A bad book is as much of a labor to write as a good one; it comes as sincerely from the author's soul.

Huxley, Aldous

47.

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

48.

Books are men of higher stature; the only men that speak aloud for future times to hear.

Barrett, E.S.

49.

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