Motivational Quotes

Books - reading

To sit alone in the lamplight with a book spread out before you hold intimate converse with men of unseen generations -- such is pleasure beyond compare.

- Kenko, Yoshida

Best Quotes about Books - reading

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

A vacuum of ideas affects people differently than a vacuum of air, otherwise readers of books would be constantly collapsing.

Lichtenberg, Georg C.

The best effect of any book, is that it excites the reader to self-activity.

Carlyle, Thomas

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

Lee, Harper

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

Locke, John

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.

There is no robber worse than a bad book.

Proverb, Italian

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

Maclennan, Hugh

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

10.

The newest books are those that never grow old.

Jackson, George Holbrook

11.

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

Mcluhan, Marshall

12.

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.

13.

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

Jackson, Holbrook

14.

A dose of poison can do its work but once. A bad book can go on poisoning minds for generations.

Murray, William

15.

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

Pound, Ezra

16.

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

17.

He had read much, if one considers his long life; but his contemplation was much more than his reading. He was wont to say that if he had read as much as other men he should have known no more than other men.

Aubrey, John

18.

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

19.

Read Homer once, and you can read no more. For all books else appear so mean, and so poor. Verse will seem prose; but still persist to read, and Homer will be all the books you need.

Buckingham, Duke of

20.

Fiction reveals truth that reality obscures.

West, Jessamyn

21.

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

22.

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

23.

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

Lee, Spike

24.

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

Schopenhauer, Arthur

25.

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

26.

To read too many books is harmful.

Zedong, Mao

27.

Books are divided into two classes, the books of the hour and the books of all time.

Ruskin, John

28.

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.

29.

The flood of print has turned reading into a process of gulping rather than savoring

Chappell, Warren

30.

Read good, big important things.

Noonan, Peggy

31.

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

32.

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

Mencken, H. L.

33.

Americans will listen, but they do not care to read. War and Peace must wait for the leisure of retirement, which never really comes: meanwhile it helps to furnish the living room. Blockbusting fiction is bought as furniture. Unread, it maintains its value. Read, it looks like money wasted. Cunningly, Americans know that books contain a person, and they want the person, not the book.

Burgess, Anthony

34.

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

Channing, William Ellery

35.

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

36.

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

37.

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

38.

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

Belloc, Hilaire

39.

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

Hugo, Victor

40.

The books that everybody admires are those that nobody reads.

France, Anatole

41.

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

Hope, Anthony

42.

Books are the blessed chloroform of the mind.

Chambers, Robert

43.

The reading or non-reading a book will never keep down a single petticoat.

Byron, Lord

44.

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

Millay, Edna St. Vincent

45.

Today a reader, tomorrow a leader.

Fusselman, W.

46.

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

47.

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

48.

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

49.

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

50.

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

Fuller, Margaret