Motivational Quotes

Books - reading

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

- Trollope, Anthony

Best Quotes about Books - reading

How many a man has dated a new era in his life from the reading of a book! The book exists for us, perchance, that will explain our miracles and reveal new ones. The at present unutterable things we may find somewhere uttered.

Thoreau, Henry David

The only books that influence us are those for which we are ready, and which have gone a little farther down our particular path than we have yet got ourselves.

Forster, Edward M.

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

Camus, Albert

If a book comes from the heart it will contrive to reach other hearts. All art and author craft are of small account to that.

Carlyle, Thomas

Readers are plentiful: thinkers are rare.

Martineau, Harriet

The age of the book is almost gone.

Steiner, George

The good parts of a book may be only something a writer is lucky enough to overhear or it may be the wreck of his whole damn life --and one is as good as the other.

Hemingway, Ernest

Fiction reveals truth that reality obscures.

West, Jessamyn

The mortality of all inanimate things is terrible to me, but that of books most of all.

Howells, William Dean

10.

Everything in the world exists to end up in a book.

Mallarme, Stephane

11.

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

12.

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.

13.

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

14.

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

15.

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

16.

I've never know any trouble than an hour's reading didn't assuage.

Secondat, Charles de

17.

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

Lee, Harper

18.

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.

19.

The book you don't read won't help.

Rohn, Jim

20.

I read the newspaper avidly. It is my one form of continuous fiction.

Bevan, Aneurin

21.

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

Schopenhauer, Arthur

22.

The world may be full of fourth-rate writers but it's also full of fourth-rate readers.

Barstow, Stan

23.

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

Proverb, American

24.

I feel a kind of reverence for the first books of young authors. There is so much aspiration in them, so much audacious hope and trembling fear, so much of the heart's history, that all errors and shortcomings are for a while lost sight of in the amiable self assertion of youth.

Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth

25.

I am a part of everything that I have read.

Kieran, John

26.

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

27.

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

28.

A great book should leave you with many experiences and slightly exhausted at the end. You should live several lives while reading it.

Styron, William

29.

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

30.

Books and marriage go ill together.

Moliere

31.

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

Carlyle, Thomas

32.

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

Tupper, Martin

33.

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

34.

Books are standing counselors and preachers, always at hand, and always disinterested; having this advantage over oral instructors, that they are ready to repeat their lesson as often as we please.

Chambers, Oswald

35.

People are much more willing to lend you books than bookcases.

Twain, Mark

36.

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

37.

Many books require no thought from those who read them, and for a very simple reason: they made no such demand upon those who wrote them. Those works, therefore, are the most valuable, that set our thinking faculties in the fullest operation. understand them.

Clarendon

38.

Books are not men and yet they stay alive.

Benet, Stephen Vincent

39.

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

Phelps, William Lyon

40.

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.

41.

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

42.

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

Voltaire

43.

There are very many people who read simply to prevent themselves from thinking.

Lichtenberg, Georg C.

44.

There was a time when the world acted on books; now books act on the world.

Joubert, Joseph

45.

Books are lighthouses erected in the great sea of time.

Whipple, Edwin P.

46.

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

Phillips, Wendell

47.

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

48.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

49.

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.

50.

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