Motivational Quotes

Books - reading

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

- Asimov, Isaac

Best Quotes about Books - reading

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

Rohn, Jim

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

Mencken, H. L.

He had read much, if one considers his long life; but his contemplation was much more than his reading. He was wont to say that if he had read as much as other men he should have known no more than other men.

Aubrey, John

Reading the Scriptures is an uplifting experience.

No matter how busy you may think you are, you must find time for reading, or surrender yourself to self-chosen ignorance.

Townsend, Atwood H.

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

She could give herself up to the written word as naturally as a good dancer to music or a fine swimmer to water. The only difficulty was that after finishing the last sentence she was left with a feeling at once hollow and uncomfortably full. Exactly like indigestion.

Rhys, Jean

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

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

10.

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

11.

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

Spielberg, Steven

12.

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

Rohn, Jim

13.

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

Porter, Noah

14.

There is a set of religious, or rather moral, writings which teach that virtue is the certain road to happiness, and vice to misery in this world. A very wholesome and comfortable doctrine, and to which we have but one objection, namely, that it is not true.

Fielding, Henry

15.

Surviving and thriving as a professional today demands two new approaches to the written word. First, it requires a new approach to orchestrating information, by skillfully choosing what to read and what to ignore. Second, it requires a new approach to integrating information, by reading faster and with greater comprehension.

Calano, Jimmy

16.

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

17.

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

Twain, Mark

18.

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

Mcluhan, Marshall

19.

A good book, in the language of the book-sellers, is a salable one; in that of the curious, a scarce one; in that of men of sense, a useful and instructive one.

Chambers, Oswald

20.

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

Coolio

21.

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

22.

The newest books are those that never grow old.

Jackson, George Holbrook

23.

There is creative reading as well as creative writing.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

24.

The reading of all good books is like a conversation with all the finest men of past centuries.

Descartes, Rene

25.

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

Chesterton, Gilbert K.

26.

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

27.

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

Johnson, Samuel

28.

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

Howells, William Dean

29.

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

Asimov, Isaac

30.

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.

31.

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

32.

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

33.

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

34.

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.

35.

The world may be full of fourth-rate writers but it's also full of fourth-rate readers.

Barstow, Stan

36.

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

37.

I am a part of everything that I have read.

Kieran, John

38.

The books one has written in the past have two surprises in store: one couldn't write them again, and wouldn't want to.

Rostand, Jean

39.

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

40.

How can you dare teach a man to read until you've taught him everything else first?

Shaw, George Bernard

41.

Fiction reveals truth that reality obscures.

West, Jessamyn

42.

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

Brodsky, Joseph

43.

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

44.

A house is not a home unless it contains food and fire for the mind as well as the body.

Fuller, Margaret

45.

Footnotes are the finer-suckered surfaces that allow testicular paragraphs to hold fast to the wider reality of the library.

Baker, Nicholson

46.

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

47.

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

48.

Reading is a basic tool in the living of a good life.

Adler, Mortimer J.

49.

'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

50.

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