Motivational Quotes

Books - reading

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

Best Quotes about Books - reading

A multitude of books distracts the mind.

Socrates

I am a part of everything that I have read.

Kieran, John

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

Lichtenberg, Georg C.

Books are men of higher stature; the only men that speak aloud for future times to hear.

Barrett, E.S.

Very young children eat their books, literally devouring their contents. This is one reason for the scarcity of first editions of Alice in Wonderland and other favorites of the nursery.

Rosenbach, A. S. W.

Somewhere, everywhere, now hidden, now apparent in what ever is written down, is the form of a human being. If we seek to know him, are we idly occupied?

Woolf, Virginia

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

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

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

Spielberg, Steven

10.

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

11.

One always tends to overpraise a long book, because one has got through it.

Forster, Edward M.

12.

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

13.

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

14.

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

Twain, Mark

15.

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

Carey, Joyce

16.

It does not follow because many books are written by persons born in America that there exists an American literature. Books which imitate or represent the thoughts and life of Europe do not constitute an American literature. Before such can exist, an original idea must animate this nation and fresh currents of life must call into life fresh thoughts along the shore.

Fuller, Margaret

17.

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

Rohn, Jim

18.

A book worth reading is worth buying.

Ruskin, John

19.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

20.

The oldest books are still only just out to those who have not read them.

Butler, Samuel

21.

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

22.

Do we write books so that they shall merely be read? Don't we also write them for employment in the household? For one that is read from start to finish, thousands are leafed through, other thousands lie motionless, others are jammed against mouseholes, thrown at rats, others are stood on, sat on, drummed on, have gingerbread baked on them or are used to light pipes.

Lichtenberg, Georg C.

23.

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

24.

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

25.

A bibliophile of little means is likely to suffer often. Books don't slip from his hands but fly past him through the air, high as birds, high as prices.

Neruda, Pablo

26.

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

27.

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

Blackie, Professor

28.

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

29.

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

30.

Reading furnishes the mind only with material for knowledge; it is thinking that makes what we read ours.

Locke, John

31.

You will find most books worth reading are worth reading twice.

Morely, John

32.

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

Maugham, W. Somerset

33.

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.

34.

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

35.

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

Porter, Noah

36.

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

37.

The tools I need for my work are paper, tobacco, food, and a little whiskey.

Faulkner, William

38.

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

Pascal, Blaise

39.

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

Lichtenberg, Georg C.

40.

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

Schopenhauer, Arthur

41.

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

42.

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.

43.

All the best stories in the world are but one story in reality -- the story of escape. It is the only thing which interests us all and at all times, how to escape.

Benson, Arthur Christopher

44.

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

45.

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.

46.

Books are lighthouses erected in the great sea of time.

Whipple, Edwin P.

47.

What is the most precious, the most exciting smell awaiting you in the house when you return to it after a dozen years or so? The smell of roses, you think? No, moldering books.

Sinyavsky, Andre

48.

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

Hood, Thomas

49.

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

Wilde, Oscar

50.

It is books that teach us to refine our pleasures when young, and to recall them with satisfaction when we are old.

Hunt, Leigh