Motivational Quotes

Books - reading

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

- Howells, William Dean

Best Quotes about Books - reading

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

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

Gibbon, Edward

A book is a part of life, a manifestation of life, just as much as a tree or a horse or a star. It obeys its own rhythms, its own laws, whether it be a novel, a play, or a diary. The deep, hidden rhythm of life is always there -- that of the pulse, the heart beat.

Miller, Henry

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

Disraeli, Benjamin

Read Homer once, and you can read no more. For all books else appear so mean, and so poor. Verse will seem prose; but still persist to read, and Homer will be all the books you need.

Buckingham, Duke of

The real risks for any artist are taken in pushing the work to the limits of what is possible, in the attempt to increase the sum of what it is possible to think. Books become good when they go to this edge and risk falling over it --when they endanger the artist by reason of what he has, or has not, artistically dared.

Rushdie, Salman

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

Twain, Mark

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

Mccay, James T.

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

10.

The books that the world calls immoral are the books that show the world its own shame.

Wilde, Oscar

11.

A dose of poison can do its work but once. A bad book can go on poisoning minds for generations.

Murray, William

12.

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

Colton, Charles Caleb

13.

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

14.

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

Maugham, W. Somerset

15.

The reading or non-reading a book will never keep down a single petticoat.

Byron, Lord

16.

Next, in importance to books are their titles.

Davies, Paul

17.

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

Butler, Samuel

18.

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.

19.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

20.

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

Chesterton, Gilbert K.

21.

The age of the book is almost gone.

Steiner, George

22.

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

23.

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

Locke, John

24.

Books are lighthouses erected in the great sea of time.

Whipple, Edwin P.

25.

A book worth reading is worth buying.

Ruskin, John

26.

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

Porter, Noah

27.

Every man is a volume if you know how to read him.

Channing, William Ellery

28.

Books and marriage go ill together.

Moliere

29.

I heard his library burned down and both books were destroyed -- and one of them hadn't even been colored in yet.

Dawkins, John

30.

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

Lichtenberg, Georg C.

31.

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

32.

Everything you need for better future and success has already been written. And guess what? All you have to do is go to the library.

Rohn, Jim

33.

Reading the Scriptures is an uplifting experience.

34.

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

Kempis, Thomas

35.

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

Phelps, William Lyon

36.

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

Mallarme, Stephane

37.

Reading a book is like re-writing it for yourself. You bring to a novel, anything you read, all your experience of the world. You bring your history and you read it in your own terms.

Carter, Angela

38.

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

Millay, Edna St. Vincent

39.

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

Forster, Edward M.

40.

Books give not wisdom where none was before. But where some is, there reading makes it more.

Harington, John

41.

What is reading, but silent conversation.

Landor, Walter Savage

42.

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

43.

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.

44.

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

45.

The Brahmins say that in their books there are many predictions of times in which it will rain. But press those books as strongly as you can, you can not get out of them a drop of water. So you can not get out of all the books that contain the best precepts the smallest good deed.

Tolstoy, Count Leo

46.

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

Barrett, E.S.

47.

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

Critchfield, Jim

48.

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

49.

The novel can't compete with cars, the movies, television, and liquor. A guy who's had a good feed and tanked up on good wine gives his old lady a kiss after supper and his day is over. Finished.

Celine, Louis-Ferdinand

50.

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

Bulwer-Lytton, Edward G.