Motivational Quotes

Books - reading

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

Best Quotes about Books - reading

Tradition is but a meteor, which, if it once falls, cannot be rekindled. Memory, once interrupted, is not to be recalled. But written learning is a fixed luminary, which, after the cloud that had hidden it has passed away, is again bright in its proper station. So books are faithful repositories, which may be awhile neglected or forgotten, but when opened again, will again impart instruction.

Johnson

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

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

There are very many people who read simply to prevent themselves from thinking.

Lichtenberg, Georg C.

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

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

A good title is the title of a successful book.

Chandler, Raymond

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

Pound, Ezra

No furniture is so charming as books.

Smith, Sydney

10.

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.

11.

A library is thought in cold storage.

Samuel, Herbert

12.

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

13.

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

Brookner, Anita

14.

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

15.

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

Secondat, Charles de

16.

The age of the book is almost gone.

Steiner, George

17.

Everything you need for better future and success has already been written. And guess what? All you have to do is go to the library.

Rohn, Jim

18.

Then I though of reading -- the nice and subtle happiness of reading ... this joy not dulled by age, this polite and unpunishable vice, this selfish, serene, lifelong intoxication.

Smith, Logan Pearsall

19.

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

Phillips, Wendell

20.

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

Vaneigem, Raoul

21.

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

Bulwer-Lytton, Edward G.

22.

Read good, big important things.

Noonan, Peggy

23.

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

24.

You've really got to start hitting the books because it's no joke out here.

Lee, Spike

25.

What is important is not to be able to read rapidly, but to be able to decide what not to read.

Mccay, James T.

26.

I feel a kind of reverence for the first books of young authors. There is so much aspiration in them, so much audacious hope and trembling fear, so much of the heart's history, that all errors and shortcomings are for a while lost sight of in the amiable self assertion of youth.

Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth

27.

'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

28.

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

Chesterton, Gilbert K.

29.

No story is the same to us after a lapse of time; or rather we who read it are no longer the same interpreters.

Eliot, George

30.

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

31.

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

Bach, Richard

32.

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.

33.

My early and invincible love of reading I would not exchange for all the riches of India.

Gibbon, Edward

34.

A man ought to read just as his inclination leads him; for what he reads as a task will do him little good.

Johnson, Samuel

35.

Don't just read the easy stuff. You may be entertained by it, but you will never grow from it.

Rohn, Jim

36.

The books we think we ought to read are poky, dull, and dry; The books that we would like to read we are ashamed to buy; The books that people talk about we never can recall; And the books that people give us, oh, they're the worst of all.

Wells, Carolyn

37.

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

38.

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

39.

A novel is a mirror carried along a main road.

Stendhal, Henri B.

40.

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

Trollope, Anthony

41.

If a secret history of books could be written, and the author's private thoughts and meanings noted down alongside of his story, how many insipid volumes would become interesting, and dull tales excite the reader!

Thackeray, William M.

42.

A book that is shut is but a block.

Fuller, Thomas

43.

I would sooner read a timetable or a catalog than nothing at all.

Maugham, W. Somerset

44.

Thy books should, like thy friends, not many be, yet such wherein men may thy judgment see.

Wycherley, William

45.

The real risks for any artist are taken in pushing the work to the limits of what is possible, in the attempt to increase the sum of what it is possible to think. Books become good when they go to this edge and risk falling over it --when they endanger the artist by reason of what he has, or has not, artistically dared.

Rushdie, Salman

46.

Next, in importance to books are their titles.

Davies, Paul

47.

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

Temple, Sir William

48.

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

Brodsky, Joseph

49.

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

Twain, Mark

50.

Except a living man there is nothing more wonderful than a book! a message to us from the dead -- from human souls we never saw, who lived, perhaps, thousands of miles away. And yet these, in those little sheets of paper, speak to us, arouse us, terrify us, teach us, comfort us, open their hearts to us as brothers.

Kingsley, Charles