Motivational Quotes

Books - reading

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

- Voltaire

Best Quotes about Books - reading

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

Critchfield, Jim

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.

Books are the blessed chloroform of the mind.

Chambers, Robert

When you have mastered numbers, you will in fact no longer be reading numbers, any more than you read words when reading books You will be reading meanings.

Geneen, Harold S.

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

Marcel, Anthony

Thank you for sending me a copy of your book -- I'll waste no time reading it.

Hadas, Moses

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

Barrett, E.S.

A novel must be exceptionally good to live as long as the average cat.

Maclennan, Hugh

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

Mallarme, Stephane

10.

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

Hubbard, Elbert

11.

To sit alone in the lamplight with a book spread out before you hold intimate converse with men of unseen generations -- such is pleasure beyond compare.

Kenko, Yoshida

12.

Books are those faithful mirrors that reflect to our mind the minds of sages and heroes.

Gibbon, Edward

13.

A book might be written on the injustice of the just.

Hope, Anthony

14.

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

15.

Fiction reveals truth that reality obscures.

West, Jessamyn

16.

When you reread a classic, you do not see more in the book than you did before; you see more in you than there was before.

Fadiman, Clifton

17.

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

18.

Books, like friends, should be few and well chosen. Like friends, too, we should return to them again and again for, like true friends, they will never fail us -- never cease to instruct -- never cloy.

Colton, Charles Caleb

19.

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

Ruskin, John

20.

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

21.

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

Faulkner, William

22.

You will find most books worth reading are worth reading twice.

Morely, John

23.

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

24.

Here, my dear Lucy, hide these books. Quick, quick! Fling Peregrine Pickle under the toilette --throw Roderick Random into the closet --put The Innocent Adultery into The Whole Duty of Man; thrust Lord Aimworth under the sofa! cram Ovid behind the bolster; there --put The Man of Feeling into your pocket. Now for them.

Sheridan, Richard Brinsley

25.

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

Butler, Samuel

26.

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

27.

No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader.

Frost, Robert

28.

A book that is shut is but a block.

Fuller, Thomas

29.

The newest books are those that never grow old.

Jackson, George Holbrook

30.

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

Rochman, Hazel

31.

All good books are alike in that they are truer than if they had really happened and after you are finished reading one you will feel that all that happened to you and afterwards it all belongs to you; the good and the bad, the ecstasy, the remorse, and sorrow, the people and the places and how the weather was.

Hemingway, Ernest

32.

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

Temple, Sir William

33.

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

Rohn, Jim

34.

We are too civil to books. For a few golden sentences we will turn over and actually read a volume of four or five hundred pages.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

35.

Reading is to the mind what exercise is to the body. It is wholesome and bracing for the mind to have its faculties kept on the stretch.

Steele, Sir Richard

36.

A house without books is like a room without windows. No man has a right to bring up his children without surrounding them with books, if he has the means to buy them. It is a wrong to his family. Children learn to read by being in the presence of books. The love of knowledge comes with reading and grows upon it. And the love of knowledge, in a young mind, is almost always a warrant against the inferior excitement of passions and vices.

Mann, Horace

37.

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

Carlyle, Thomas

38.

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

Lichtenberg, Georg C.

39.

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

Lawrence, D. H.

40.

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

41.

The printing press is either the greatest blessing or the greatest curse of modern times, sometimes one forgets which it is.

Barrie, Sir James M.

42.

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

Twain, Mark

43.

I am not a speed reader. I am a speed understander.

Asimov, Isaac

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

Mencken, H. L.

46.

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

Bevan, Aneurin

47.

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

48.

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

49.

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

Hood, Thomas

50.

There is no robber worse than a bad book.

Proverb, Italian