Motivational Quotes

Books - reading

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

- Marcel, Anthony

Best Quotes about Books - reading

Readers are less and less seen as mere non-writers, the subhuman other or flawed derivative of the author; the lack of a pen is no longer a shameful mark of secondary status but a positively enabling space, just as within every writer can be seen to lurk, as a repressed but contaminating antithesis, a reader.

Eagleton, Terry

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

Johnson, Samuel

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

This book is not to be tossed lightly aside, but to be hurled with great force.

Parker, Dorothy

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

I don't think any good book is based on factual experience. Bad books are about things the writer already knew before he wrote them.

Fuentes, Carlos

No furniture is so charming as books.

Smith, Sydney

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

I always begin at the left with the opening word of the sentence and read toward the right and I recommend this method.

Thurber, James

10.

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

Lichtenberg, Georg C.

11.

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

12.

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

13.

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

14.

The multitude of books is a great evil. There is no limit to this fever for writing.

Luther, Martin

15.

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

Spielberg, Steven

16.

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

Chappell, Warren

17.

Beware of the person of one book.

Aquinas, St. Thomas

18.

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

19.

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

20.

Does there, I wonder, exist a being who has read all, or approximately all, that the person of average culture is supposed to have read, and that not to have read is a social sin? If such a being does exist, surely he is an old, a very old man.

Bennett, Arnold

21.

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

Camus, Albert

22.

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

Brodsky, Joseph

23.

Early in the morning, at break of day, in all the freshness and dawn of one's strength, to read a book --I call that vicious!

Nietzsche, Friedrich

24.

Who ever converses among old books will be hard to please among the new.

Temple, Sir William

25.

Read good, big important things.

Noonan, Peggy

26.

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

Millay, Edna St. Vincent

27.

A book worth reading is worth buying.

Ruskin, John

28.

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.

29.

One half who graduate from college never read another book.

True, Herbert

30.

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

Butler, Samuel

31.

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.

32.

The tools I need for my work are paper, tobacco, food, and a little whiskey.

Faulkner, William

33.

'Tis the good reader that makes the good book; in every book he finds passages which seem to be confidences or sides hidden from all else and unmistakably meant for his ear; the profit of books is according to the sensibility of the reader; the profound thought or passion sleeps as in a mine, until it is discovered by an equal mind and heart.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

34.

I would sooner read a timetable or a catalog than nothing at all.

Maugham, W. Somerset

35.

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

36.

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

37.

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

Erasmus, Desiderius

38.

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

39.

Readers are plentiful: thinkers are rare.

Martineau, Harriet

40.

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

Howells, William Dean

41.

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

42.

Some books leave us free and some books make us free.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

43.

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

Locke, John

44.

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

45.

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

46.

Every abridgement of a good book is a fool abridged.

Montaigne, Michel Eyquem De

47.

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

48.

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

Auden, W. H.

49.

No entertainment is so cheap as reading, nor is any pleasure so lasting.