Motivational Quotes

Books - reading

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

Best Quotes about Books - reading

The books one reads in childhood, and perhaps most of all the bad and good bad books, create in one's mind a sort of false map of the world, a series of fabulous countries into which one can retreat at odd moments throughout the rest of life, and which in some cases can survive a visit to the real countries which they are supposed to represent.

Orwell, George

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

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

Schopenhauer, Arthur

Ideally a book would have no order to it, and the reader would have to discover his own.

Vaneigem, Raoul

Some books leave us free and some books make us free.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

This is not a book. This is libel, slander, defamation of character. This is not a book, in the ordinary sense of the word. No, this is a prolonged insult, a gob of spit in the face of Art, a kick in the pants to God, Man, Destiny, Time, Love, Beauty... what you will. I am going to sing for you, a little off key perhaps, but I will sing.

Miller, Henry

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.

My early and invincible love of reading I would not exchange for all the riches of India.

Gibbon, Edward

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

10.

Thank you for sending me a copy of your book -- I'll waste no time reading it.

Hadas, Moses

11.

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

12.

Then I though of reading -- the nice and subtle happiness of reading ... this joy not dulled by age, this polite and unpunishable vice, this selfish, serene, lifelong intoxication.

Smith, Logan Pearsall

13.

In any situation, ask yourself: What strengths do I possess that can contribute towards accomplishing something in this situation? Then follow through.

14.

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

Jackson, Holbrook

15.

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

Mcluhan, Marshall

16.

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

17.

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

18.

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

19.

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

Pound, Ezra

20.

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

21.

One half who graduate from college never read another book.

True, Herbert

22.

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

23.

You've really got to start hitting the books because it's no joke out here.

Lee, Spike

24.

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

25.

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

Carey, Joyce

26.

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

27.

A library is thought in cold storage.

Samuel, Herbert

28.

Today a reader, tomorrow a leader.

Fusselman, W.

29.

Readers are less and less seen as mere non-writers, the subhuman other or flawed derivative of the author; the lack of a pen is no longer a shameful mark of secondary status but a positively enabling space, just as within every writer can be seen to lurk, as a repressed but contaminating antithesis, a reader.

Eagleton, Terry

30.

When a book raises your spirit, and inspires you with noble and manly thoughts, seek for no other test of its excellence. It is good, and made by a good workman.

Bruyere, Jean De La

31.

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''

32.

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

33.

Beware of the person of one book.

Aquinas, St. Thomas

34.

What is a diary as a rule? A document useful to the person who keeps it. Dull to the contemporary who reads it and invaluable to the student, centuries afterwards, who treasures it.

Terry, Helen

35.

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

Bach, Richard

36.

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

37.

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

Rohn, Jim

38.

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

39.

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.

40.

The books that everybody admires are those that nobody reads.

France, Anatole

41.

I heard his library burned down and both books were destroyed -- and one of them hadn't even been colored in yet.

Dawkins, John

42.

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

Maugham, W. Somerset

43.

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

Proverb, American

44.

A book worth reading is worth buying.

Ruskin, John

45.

The classics are only primitive literature. They belong to the same class as primitive machinery and primitive music and primitive medicine.

Leacock, Stephen B.

46.

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

Porter, Noah

47.

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

48.

Does there, I wonder, exist a being who has read all, or approximately all, that the person of average culture is supposed to have read, and that not to have read is a social sin? If such a being does exist, surely he is an old, a very old man.

Bennett, Arnold

49.

Books are the blessed chloroform of the mind.

Chambers, Robert

50.

It is from books that wise people derive consolation in the troubles of life.

Hugo, Victor