Motivational Quotes

Books - reading

Everything in this book may be wrong. [The Savior's Manual]

- Bach, Richard

Best Quotes about Books - reading

The book salesman should be honored because he brings to our attention, as a rule, the very books we need most and neglect most.

Crane, Frank

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

The words of my book nothing, the drift of it everything.

Whitman, Walt

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.

What is reading, but silent conversation.

Landor, Walter Savage

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.

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

Adler, Mortimer J.

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

Rochman, Hazel

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

Lichtenberg, Georg C.

10.

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

11.

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

Wesley, John

12.

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

Murray, William

13.

A novel points out that the world consists entirely of exceptions.

Carey, Joyce

14.

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

15.

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

16.

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

17.

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

Pound, Ezra

18.

The greatest gift is the passion for reading. It is cheap, it consoles, it distracts, it excites, it gives you knowledge of the world and experience of a wide kind. It is a moral illumination.

Hardwick, Elizabeth

19.

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

Hood, Thomas

20.

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

21.

Books and marriage go ill together.

Moliere

22.

This is not a book. This is libel, slander, defamation of character. This is not a book, in the ordinary sense of the word. No, this is a prolonged insult, a gob of spit in the face of Art, a kick in the pants to God, Man, Destiny, Time, Love, Beauty... what you will. I am going to sing for you, a little off key perhaps, but I will sing.

Miller, Henry

23.

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

Howells, William Dean

24.

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

Asimov, Isaac

25.

I don't think any good book is based on factual experience. Bad books are about things the writer already knew before he wrote them.

Fuentes, Carlos

26.

An empty book is like an infant's soul, in which anything may be written. It is capable of all things, but containeth nothing. I have a mind to fill this with profitable wonders.

Traherne, Thomas

27.

Books are the blessed chloroform of the mind.

Chambers, Robert

28.

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

Mencken, H. L.

29.

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

30.

The book to read is not the one which thinks for you, but the one which makes you think. No book in the world equals the Bible for that.

Mccosh

31.

A book worth reading is worth buying.

Ruskin, John

32.

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

Johnson, Samuel

33.

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

Phillips, Wendell

34.

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

Harington, John

35.

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

36.

Until I feared I would lose it, I never loved to read. One does not love breathing.

Lee, Harper

37.

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

38.

Books in a large university library system: 2, 000,000. Books in an average large city library: 1 0,000. Average number of books in a chain bookstore: 30, 000. Books in an average neighborhood branch library: 20, 000.

Horowitz, Lois

39.

The reason that fiction is more interesting than any other form of literature, to those who really like to study people, is that in fiction the author can really tell the truth without humiliating himself.

Roosevelt, Eleanor

40.

Books are the bees which carry the quickening pollen from one to another mind.

Lowell, James Russell

41.

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

42.

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

Channing, William Ellery

43.

Books succeed, and lives fail.

Browning, Elizabeth Barrett

44.

Most books today seemed to have been written overnight from books read the day before.

Chamfort, Sebastien-Roch Nicolas De

45.

I am a part of everything that I have read.

Kieran, John

46.

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.

47.

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

Twain, Mark

48.

Americans will listen, but they do not care to read. War and Peace must wait for the leisure of retirement, which never really comes: meanwhile it helps to furnish the living room. Blockbusting fiction is bought as furniture. Unread, it maintains its value. Read, it looks like money wasted. Cunningly, Americans know that books contain a person, and they want the person, not the book.

Burgess, Anthony

49.

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

50.

I've never know any trouble than an hour's reading didn't assuage.

Secondat, Charles de