Motivational Quotes

Books - reading

Books are not men and yet they stay alive.

- Benet, Stephen Vincent

Best Quotes about Books - reading

The last thing one discovers in composing a work is what to put first.

Pascal, Blaise

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

Asimov, Isaac

The Bible remained for me a book of books, still divine -- but divine in the sense that all great books are divine which teach men how to live righteously.

Keith, Sir Arthur

Beware of the person of one book.

Aquinas, St. Thomas

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

Read, read, read. Read everything-- trash, classics, good and bad, and see how they do it. Just like a carpenter who works as an apprentice and studies the master. Read! You'll absorb it. Then write. If it is good, you'll find out. If it's not, throw it out the window.

Faulkner, William

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

Adler, Mortimer J.

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

Ruskin, John

There is more treasure in books than in all the pirates loot on Treasure Island and best of all, you can enjoy these riches every day of your life.

Disney, Walt

10.

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

11.

Books are lighthouses erected in the great sea of time.

Whipple, Edwin P.

12.

A great book should leave you with many experiences and slightly exhausted at the end. You should live several lives while reading it.

Styron, William

13.

A book worth reading is worth buying.

Ruskin, John

14.

Read good, big important things.

Noonan, Peggy

15.

A conventional good read is usually a bad read, a relaxing bath in what we know already. A true good read is surely an act of innovative creation in which we, the readers, become conspirators.

Bradbury, Malcolm

16.

A multitude of books distracts the mind.

Socrates

17.

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

18.

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.

19.

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

20.

Book love... is your pass to the greatest, the purest, and the most perfect pleasure that God has prepared for His creatures.

Trollope, Anthony

21.

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

22.

Books are not absolutely dead things, but do contain a certain potency of life in them, to be as active as the soul whose progeny they are; they preserve, as in a vial, the purest efficacy and extraction of the living intellect that bred them.

Milton, John

23.

There was a time when the world acted on books; now books act on the world.

Joubert, Joseph

24.

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

Maclennan, Hugh

25.

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

Byron, Lord

26.

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

27.

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

Porter, Noah

28.

To buy books would be a good thing if we also could buy the time to read them.

Schopenhauer, Arthur

29.

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

30.

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

31.

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

32.

What we become depends on what we read after all the professors have finished with us. The greatest university of all is the collection of books.

Carlyle, Thomas

33.

Readers are less and less seen as mere non-writers, the subhuman other or flawed derivative of the author; the lack of a pen is no longer a shameful mark of secondary status but a positively enabling space, just as within every writer can be seen to lurk, as a repressed but contaminating antithesis, a reader.

Eagleton, Terry

34.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

35.

When I am dead, I hope it may be said: His sins were scarlet, but his books were read.

Belloc, Hilaire

36.

The books that everybody admires are those that nobody reads.

France, Anatole

37.

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

Rochman, Hazel

38.

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

39.

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

40.

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

41.

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.

42.

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

Wilde, Oscar

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.

Fiction reveals truth that reality obscures.

West, Jessamyn

45.

A book is a mirror: If an ass peers into it, you can't expect an apostle to look out.

Lichtenberg, Georg C.

46.

The good parts of a book may be only something a writer is lucky enough to overhear or it may be the wreck of his whole damn life --and one is as good as the other.

Hemingway, Ernest

47.

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

Brookner, Anita

48.

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

49.

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

Temple, Sir William

50.

The books we read should be chosen with great care, that they may be, as an Egyptian king wrote over his library, The medicines of the soul.