Motivational Quotes

Books - reading

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.

Best Quotes about Books - reading

When we read a story, we inhabit it. The covers of the book are like a roof and four walls. What is to happen next will take place within the four walls of the story. And this is possible because the story's voice makes everything its own.

Berger, John

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

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

Shaw, George Bernard

A person of mature years and ripe development, who is expecting nothing from literature but the corroboration and renewal of past ideas, may find satisfaction in a lucidity so complete as to occasion no imaginative excitement, but young and ambitious students are not content with it. They seek the excitement because they are capable of the growth that it accompanies.

Cooley, Charles Horton

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

Fiction reveals truth that reality obscures.

West, Jessamyn

Read as you taste fruit or savor wine, or enjoy friendship, love or life.

Jackson, Holbrook

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

Don't ask me who's influenced me. A lion is made up of the lambs he's digested, and I've been reading all my life.

Seferis, Giorgos

10.

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

Hood, Thomas

11.

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

Colton, Charles Caleb

12.

Read nothing that you do not care to remember, and remember nothing you do not mean to use.

Blackie, Professor

13.

The constant habit of perusing devout books is so indispensable, that it has been termed the oil of the lamp of prayer. Too much reading, however, and too little meditation, may produce the effect of a lamp inverted; which is extinguished by the very excess of that ailment, whose property is to feed it.

More, Hannah

14.

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

Secondat, Charles de

15.

There is no such thing as a moral book or an immoral book. Books are well written or badly written. That is all.

Wilde, Oscar

16.

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

17.

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

18.

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

Wesley, John

19.

How many a man has dated a new era in his life from the reading of a book! The book exists for us, perchance, that will explain our miracles and reveal new ones. The at present unutterable things we may find somewhere uttered.

Thoreau, Henry David

20.

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

21.

As writers become more numerous, it is natural for readers to become more indolent; whence must necessarily arise a desire of attaining knowledge with the greatest possible ease.

Goldsmith, Oliver

22.

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

Disraeli, Benjamin

23.

Books are not men and yet they stay alive.

Benet, Stephen Vincent

24.

The lessons taught in great books are misleading. The commerce in life is rarely so simple and never so just.

Brookner, Anita

25.

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

Baker, Nicholson

26.

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

Marcel, Anthony

27.

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

Hadas, Moses

28.

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

Hubbard, Elbert

29.

A book that is shut is but a block.

Fuller, Thomas

30.

Ideally a book would have no order to it, and the reader would have to discover his own.

Vaneigem, Raoul

31.

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

Mencken, H. L.

32.

The world of books is the most remarkable creation of man nothing else that he builds ever lasts monuments fall; nations perish; civilization grow old and die out; new races build others. But in the world of books are volumes that have seen this happen again and again and yet live on. Still young, still as fresh as the day they were written, still telling men's hearts, of the hearts of men centuries dead.

Day, Clarence

33.

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

Ruskin, John

34.

Our high respect for a well read person is praise enough for literature.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

35.

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

36.

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

Harington, John

37.

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

Lawrence, D. H.

38.

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.

39.

In the case of good books, the point is not how many of them you can get through, but rather how many can get through to you.

Adler, Mortimer J.

40.

Most books, like their authors, are born to die; of only a few books can it be said that death has no dominion over them; they live, and their influence lives forever.

Swartz, J.

41.

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

42.

Books to judicious compilers, are useful; to particular arts and professions, they are absolutely necessary; to men of real science, they are tools: but more are tools to them.

Johnson

43.

Happy is he who has laid up in his youth, and held fast in all fortune, a genuine and passionate love for reading.

Choate, Rufus

44.

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

Leacock, Stephen B.

45.

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

Bulwer-Lytton, Edward G.

46.

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

Pound, Ezra

47.

Early in the morning, at break of day, in all the freshness and dawn of one's strength, to read a book --I call that vicious!

Nietzsche, Friedrich

48.

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

Lowell, James Russell

49.

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

50.

'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