Motivational Quotes

Books - reading

God be thanked for books; they are the voices of the distant and the dead, and make us heirs of the spiritual life of past ages.

- Channing, William Ellery

Best Quotes about Books - reading

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

Hood, Thomas

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

I feel like I'm drowning. Every night, I'm carrying home loads of things to read but I'm too exhausted. I keep clipping things and Xeroxing them and planning to read them eventually, but I just end up throwing it all away and feeling guilty.

Levine, Ghita

The books that everybody admires are those that nobody reads.

France, Anatole

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.

I divide all readers into two classes: those who read to remember and those who read to forget.

Phelps, William Lyon

The failure to read good books both enfeebles the vision and strengthens our most fatal tendency --the belief that the here and now is all there is.

Bloom, Allan

Everywhere I have sought rest and not found it, except sitting in a corner by myself with a little book.

Kempis, Thomas

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

10.

A good title is the title of a successful book.

Chandler, Raymond

11.

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

Pound, Ezra

12.

No story is the same to us after a lapse of time; or rather we who read it are no longer the same interpreters.

Eliot, George

13.

All good books are alike in that they are truer than if they had really happened and after you are finished reading one you will feel that all that happened to you and afterwards it all belongs to you; the good and the bad, the ecstasy, the remorse, and sorrow, the people and the places and how the weather was.

Hemingway, Ernest

14.

Books that you carry to the fire, and hold readily in your hand, are most useful after all.

Johnson, Samuel

15.

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

16.

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.

17.

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

18.

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

Hugo, Victor

19.

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

Butler, Samuel

20.

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

21.

Books are lighthouses erected in the great sea of time.

Whipple, Edwin P.

22.

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

Byron, Lord

23.

Very young children eat their books, literally devouring their contents. This is one reason for the scarcity of first editions of Alice in Wonderland and other favorites of the nursery.

Rosenbach, A. S. W.

24.

Most books, like their authors, are born to die; of only a few books can it be said that death has no dominion over them; they live, and their influence lives forever.

Swartz, J.

25.

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

Twain, Mark

26.

The books we think we ought to read are poky, dull, and dry; The books that we would like to read we are ashamed to buy; The books that people talk about we never can recall; And the books that people give us, oh, they're the worst of all.

Wells, Carolyn

27.

A real book is not one that we read, but one that reads us.

Auden, W. H.

28.

You will find most books worth reading are worth reading twice.

Morely, John

29.

In the case of good books, the point is not how many of them you can get through, but rather how many can get through to you.

Adler, Mortimer J.

30.

Only a generation of readers will span a generation of writers.

Spielberg, Steven

31.

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

32.

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

33.

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

Belloc, Hilaire

34.

I am not a speed reader. I am a speed understander.

Asimov, Isaac

35.

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

Disraeli, Benjamin

36.

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

Camus, Albert

37.

Readers are plentiful: thinkers are rare.

Martineau, Harriet

38.

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

Jackson, Holbrook

39.

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

Phillips, Wendell

40.

The newest books are those that never grow old.

Jackson, George Holbrook

41.

No matter how busy you may think you are, you must find time for reading, or surrender yourself to self-chosen ignorance.

Townsend, Atwood H.

42.

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

Gibbon, Edward

43.

The successful Accelerated Reader is able to read larger than normal blocks or bites of the printed page with each eye stop. He has accepted, without reservation, the philosophy that the most important benefit of reading is the gaining of information, ideas, mental picture and entertainment-not the fretting over words. He has come to the realization that words in and of themselves are for the most part insignificant.

Cutler, Wade E.

44.

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

Lee, Harper

45.

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

Gibbon, Edward

46.

Prerequisite for rereadability in books: that they be forgettable.

Rostand, Jean

47.

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

Whitman, Walt

48.

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

Vaneigem, Raoul

49.

The greatest gift is the passion for reading. It is cheap, it consoles, it distracts, it excites, it gives you knowledge of the world and experience of a wide kind. It is a moral illumination.

Hardwick, Elizabeth

50.

Books are the best of things if well used; if abused, among the worst. They are good for nothing but to inspire. I had better never see a book than be warped by its attraction clean out of my own orbit, and made a satellite instead of a system.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo