Motivational Quotes

Books - reading

A novel is never anything, but a philosophy put into images.

- Camus, Albert

Best Quotes about Books - reading

Fiction reveals truth that reality obscures.

West, Jessamyn

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

Chappell, Warren

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

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

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

Phillips, Wendell

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

Ruskin, John

Beware you be not swallowed up in books! An ounce of love is worth a pound of knowledge.

Wesley, John

I can't bear art that you can walk round and admire. A book should be either a bandit or a rebel or a man in the crowd.

Lawrence, D. H.

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

Fuller, Margaret

10.

A book that is shut is but a block.

Fuller, Thomas

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.

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

13.

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

14.

Book love... is your pass to the greatest, the purest, and the most perfect pleasure that God has prepared for His creatures.

Trollope, Anthony

15.

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

Murray, William

16.

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

17.

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.

18.

Beware of the person of one book.

Aquinas, St. Thomas

19.

No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader.

Frost, Robert

20.

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

21.

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

Marcel, Anthony

22.

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

23.

Our high respect for a well read person is praise enough for literature.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

24.

I always like to look on the optimistic side of life, but I am realistic enough to know that life is a complex matter.

Disney, Walt

25.

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

Critchfield, Jim

26.

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

Gibbon, Edward

27.

The constant habit of perusing devout books is so indispensable, that it has been termed the oil of the lamp of prayer. Too much reading, however, and too little meditation, may produce the effect of a lamp inverted; which is extinguished by the very excess of that ailment, whose property is to feed it.

More, Hannah

28.

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

29.

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

30.

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

31.

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

32.

It is books that teach us to refine our pleasures when young, and to recall them with satisfaction when we are old.

Hunt, Leigh

33.

Every abridgement of a good book is a fool abridged.

Montaigne, Michel Eyquem De

34.

A library is thought in cold storage.

Samuel, Herbert

35.

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

Hadas, Moses

36.

A multitude of books distracts the mind.

Socrates

37.

Read good, big important things.

Noonan, Peggy

38.

Education... has produced a vast population able to read but unable to distinguish what is worth reading, an easy prey to sensations and cheap appeals.

Trevelyan, G. M.

39.

If I have not read a book before, it is, for all intents and purposes, new to me whether it was printed yesterday or three hundred years ago.

Hazlitt, William

40.

My books kept me from the ring, the dog-pit, the tavern, and the saloon.

Hood, Thomas

41.

If I had my way books would not be written in English, but in an exceedingly difficult secret language that only skilled professional readers and story-tellers could interpret. Then people like you would have to go to public halls and pay good prices to hear the professionals decode and read the books aloud for you. This plan would have the advantage of scaring off all amateur authors, retired politicians, country doctors and I-Married-a-Midget writers who would not have the patience to learn the secret language.

Davies, Robertson

42.

To feel most beautifully alive means to be reading something beautiful, ready always to apprehend in the flow of language the sudden flash of poetry.

Bachelard, Gaston

43.

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

Lee, Harper

44.

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

45.

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

46.

Books, books, books had found the secret of a garret-room piled high with cases in my father's name; Piled high, packed large, --where, creeping in and out among the giant fossils of my past, like some small nimble mouse between the ribs of a mastodon, I nibbled here and there at this or that box, pulling through the gap, in heats of terror, haste, victorious joy, the first book first. And how I felt it beat under my pillow, in the morning's dark. An hour before the sun would let me read! My books!

Browning, Elizabeth Barrett

47.

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

Belloc, Hilaire

48.

A novel is never anything, but a philosophy put into images.

Camus, Albert

49.

Readers are plentiful: thinkers are rare.

Martineau, Harriet

50.

A book may be compared to your neighbor: if it be good, it cannot last too long; if bad, you cannot get rid of it too early.