Motivational Quotes

Books - reading

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

- Chesterton, Gilbert K.

Best Quotes about Books - reading

The books that everybody admires are those that nobody reads.

France, Anatole

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

A vacuum of ideas affects people differently than a vacuum of air, otherwise readers of books would be constantly collapsing.

Lichtenberg, Georg C.

Prerequisite for rereadability in books: that they be forgettable.

Rostand, Jean

To read too many books is harmful.

Zedong, Mao

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

A big leather-bound volume makes an ideal razor strap. A thin book is useful to stick under a table with a broken caster to steady it. A large, flat atlas can be used to cover a window with a broken pane. And a thick, old-fashioned heavy book with a clasp is the finest thing in the world to throw at a noisy cat.

Twain, Mark

It does not follow because many books are written by persons born in America that there exists an American literature. Books which imitate or represent the thoughts and life of Europe do not constitute an American literature. Before such can exist, an original idea must animate this nation and fresh currents of life must call into life fresh thoughts along the shore.

Fuller, Margaret

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

Schopenhauer, Arthur

10.

Old books, you know well, are books of the world's youth, and new books are the fruits of its age.

Holmes, Oliver Wendell

11.

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

Schopenhauer, Arthur

12.

Books constitute capital. A library book lasts as long as a house, for hundreds of years. It is not, then, an article of mere consumption but fairly of capital, and often in the case of professional men, setting out in life, it is their only capital.

Jefferson, Thomas

13.

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

Brodsky, Joseph

14.

No man understands a deep book until he has seen and lived at least part of its contents.

Pound, Ezra

15.

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

Bevan, Aneurin

16.

A book worth reading is worth buying.

Ruskin, John

17.

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

18.

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

19.

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

Erasmus, Desiderius

20.

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.

21.

What we become depends on what we read after all the professors have finished with us. The greatest university of all is the collection of books.

Carlyle, Thomas

22.

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

23.

We ought to reverence books; to look on them as useful and mighty things. If they are good and true, whether they are about religion, politics, farming, trade, law, or medicine, they are the message of Christ, the maker of all things -- the teacher of all truth.

Kingsley, Charles

24.

A successful book cannot afford to be more than ten percent new.

Mcluhan, Marshall

25.

In science read the newest works, in literature read the oldest.

Bulwer-Lytton, Edward G.

26.

One sheds one's sicknesses in books -- repeats and presents again one's emotions, to be master of them.

Lawrence, D. H.

27.

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

28.

To use books rightly, is to go to them for help; to appeal to them when our own knowledge and power fail; to be led by them into wider sight and purer conception than our own, and to receive from them the united sentence of the judges and councils of all time, against our solitary and unstable opinions.

Ruskin, John

29.

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

Ruskin, John

30.

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.

31.

A multitude of books distracts the mind.

Socrates

32.

Of all the ways of acquiring books, writing them oneself is regarded as the most praiseworthy method. Writers are really people who write books not because they are poor, but because they are dissatisfied with the books which they could buy but do not like.

Benjamin, Walter

33.

My books are water; those of the great geniuses are wine -- everybody drinks water.

Twain, Mark

34.

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.

35.

There are two kinds of books. Those that no one reads and those that no one ought to read.

Mencken, H. L.

36.

A book is a mirror: If an ass peers into it, you can't expect an apostle to look out.

Lichtenberg, Georg C.

37.

I am a part of everything that I have read.

Kieran, John

38.

Next to acquiring good friends, the best acquisition is that of good books.

Colton, Charles Caleb

39.

Digressions, incontestably, are the sunshine; they are the life, the soul of reading! Take them out of this book, for instance, --you might as well take the book along with them; --one cold external winter would reign in every page of it; restore them to the writer; --he steps forth like a bridegroom, --bids All-hail; brings in variety, and forbids the appetite to fail.

Sterne, Laurence

40.

A book that is shut is but a block.

Fuller, Thomas

41.

What is reading, but silent conversation.

Landor, Walter Savage

42.

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

Porter, Noah

43.

Old books that have ceased to be of service should no more be abandoned than should old friends who have ceased to give pleasure.

Worsthorne, Sir Peregrine

44.

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

Joubert, Joseph

45.

Beware of the person of one book.

Aquinas, St. Thomas

46.

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

47.

Books are men of higher stature; the only men that speak aloud for future times to hear.

Barrett, E.S.

48.

One always tends to overpraise a long book, because one has got through it.

Forster, Edward M.

49.

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

50.

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