Motivational Quotes

Books - reading

I used to walk to school with my nose buried in a book.

- Coolio

Best Quotes about Books - reading

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

Pound, Ezra

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

The chief knowledge that a man gets from reading books is the knowledge that very few of them are worth reading.

Mencken, H. L.

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

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

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

Parker, Dorothy

You've really got to start hitting the books because it's no joke out here.

Lee, Spike

You are wise, witty and wonderful, but you spend too much time reading this sort of stuff.

Critchfield, Jim

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

10.

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

11.

I love to lose myself in other men's minds. When I am not walking, I am reading. I cannot sit and think; books think for me.

Lamb, Charles

12.

'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

13.

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

Wesley, John

14.

This will never be a civilized country until we expend more money for books than we do for chewing gum.

Hubbard, Elbert

15.

Miss a meal if you have to, but don't miss a book.

Rohn, Jim

16.

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

Camus, Albert

17.

All my good reading, you might say, was done in the toilet. There are passages in Ulysses which can be read only in the toilet -- if one wants to extract the full flavor of their content.

Miller, Henry

18.

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

Hugo, Victor

19.

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

Erasmus, Desiderius

20.

A bad book is as much of a labor to write as a good one; it comes as sincerely from the author's soul.

Huxley, Aldous

21.

If a secret history of books could be written, and the author's private thoughts and meanings noted down alongside of his story, how many insipid volumes would become interesting, and dull tales excite the reader!

Thackeray, William M.

22.

What is important is not to be able to read rapidly, but to be able to decide what not to read.

Mccay, James T.

23.

Those who do not read are no better off than those who cannot read.

24.

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

Mcluhan, Marshall

25.

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

Mencken, H. L.

26.

The classics are only primitive literature. They belong to the same class as primitive machinery and primitive music and primitive medicine.

Leacock, Stephen B.

27.

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.

28.

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

29.

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

Marcel, Anthony

30.

A book may be compared to your neighbor: if it be good, it cannot last too long; if bad, you cannot get rid of it too early.

Brooke, Rupert

31.

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

Lichtenberg, Georg C.

32.

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

Phelps, William Lyon

33.

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

34.

Reading makes immigrants of us all. It takes us away from home, but more important, it finds homes for us everywhere.

Rochman, Hazel

35.

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

Trollope, Anthony

36.

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.

37.

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

Phillips, Wendell

38.

A good book is the very essence of a good man. His virtues survive in it, while the foibles and faults of his actual life are forgotten. All the goodly company of the excellent and great sit around my table, or look down on me from yonder shelves, waiting patiently to answer my questions and enrich me with their wisdom. A precious book is a foretaste of immortality.

Cuyler, Theodore L.

39.

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

Hood, Thomas

40.

Beware of the person of one book.

Aquinas, St. Thomas

41.

If I had my way books would not be written in English, but in an exceedingly difficult secret language that only skilled professional readers and story-tellers could interpret. Then people like you would have to go to public halls and pay good prices to hear the professionals decode and read the books aloud for you. This plan would have the advantage of scaring off all amateur authors, retired politicians, country doctors and I-Married-a-Midget writers who would not have the patience to learn the secret language.

Davies, Robertson

42.

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

43.

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

Rohn, Jim

44.

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

45.

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

Voltaire

46.

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

47.

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

48.

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

Luther, Martin

49.

I know every book of mine by its smell, and I have but to put my nose between the pages to be reminded of all sorts of things.

Gissing, George Robert

50.

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

Bevan, Aneurin