Motivational Quotes

Books - reading

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

- Jackson, Holbrook

Best Quotes about Books - reading

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

Lowell, James Russell

When we read a story, we inhabit it. The covers of the book are like a roof and four walls. What is to happen next will take place within the four walls of the story. And this is possible because the story's voice makes everything its own.

Berger, John

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

The books that everybody admires are those that nobody reads.

France, Anatole

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

Brodsky, Joseph

He that loves a book will never want a faithful friend, a wholesome counselor, a cheerful companion, an effectual comforter. By study, by reading, by thinking, one may innocently divert and pleasantly entertain himself, as in all weathers, as in all fortunes.

Barrow

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

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

You can either read something many times in order to be assured that you got it all, or else you can define your purpose and use techniques which will assure that you have met it and gotten what you need.

Kump, Peter

10.

After all, the world is not a stage -- not to me: nor a theatre: nor a show-house of any sort. And art, especially novels, are not little theatres where the reader sits aloft and watches... and sighs, commiserates, condones and smiles. That's what you want a book to be: because it leaves you so safe and superior, with your two-dollar ticket to the show. And that's what my books are not and never will be. Whoever reads me will be in the thick of the scrimmage, and if he doesn't like it -- if he wants a safe seat in the audience -- let him read someone else.

Lawrence, D. H.

11.

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.

12.

A good book is the best of friends, the same today and for ever.

Tupper, Martin

13.

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

Pound, Ezra

14.

All the known world, excepting only savage nations, is governed by books.

Voltaire

15.

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

16.

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

17.

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

18.

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

Chesterton, Gilbert K.

19.

The lessons taught in great books are misleading. The commerce in life is rarely so simple and never so just.

Brookner, Anita

20.

Everything you need for better future and success has already been written. And guess what? All you have to do is go to the library.

Rohn, Jim

21.

When I get a little money, I buy books; and if any is left I buy food and clothes.

Erasmus, Desiderius

22.

The worst readers are those who behave like plundering troops: they take away a few things they can use, dirty and confound the remainder, and revile the whole.

Nietzsche, Friedrich

23.

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

24.

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

25.

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

Schopenhauer, Arthur

26.

A book that is shut is but a block.

Fuller, Thomas

27.

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

Disraeli, Benjamin

28.

The oldest books are still only just out to those who have not read them.

Butler, Samuel

29.

After all manner of professors have done their best for us, the place we are to get knowledge is in books. The true university of these days is a collection of books.

Carlyle, Thomas

30.

All the best stories in the world are but one story in reality -- the story of escape. It is the only thing which interests us all and at all times, how to escape.

Benson, Arthur Christopher

31.

Without books the development of civilization would have been impossible. They are the engines of change, windows on the world, Lighthouses as the poet said erected in the sea of time. They are companions, teachers, magicians, bankers of the treasures of the mind, Books are humanity in print.

Schopenhauer, Arthur

32.

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

Hood, Thomas

33.

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

34.

Books give not wisdom where none was before. But where some is, there reading makes it more.

Harington, John

35.

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

Ruskin, John

36.

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

37.

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

38.

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

Ruskin, John

39.

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

40.

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

41.

The books we read should be chosen with great care, that they may be, as an Egyptian king wrote over his library, The medicines of the soul.

Hood, Paxton

42.

Reading is a basic tool in the living of a good life.

Adler, Mortimer J.

43.

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

Bach, Richard

44.

There is no robber worse than a bad book.

Proverb, Italian

45.

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.

46.

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

Porter, Noah

47.

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

Wesley, John

48.

A library is thought in cold storage.

Samuel, Herbert

49.

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

Twain, Mark