Motivational Quotes

Books - reading

Books are masters who instruct us without rods or ferules, without words or anger, without bread or money. If you approach them, they are not asleep; if you seek them, they do not hide; if you blunder, they do not scold; if you are ignorant, they do not laugh at you.

- Bury, Richard De

Best Quotes about Books - reading

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

No furniture is so charming as books.

Smith, Sydney

The worst readers are those who behave like plundering troops: they take away a few things they can use, dirty and confound the remainder, and revile the whole.

Nietzsche, Friedrich

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

There is creative reading as well as creative writing.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

All good books are alike in that they are truer than if they had really happened and after you are finished reading one you will feel that all that happened to you and afterwards it all belongs to you; the good and the bad, the ecstasy, the remorse, and sorrow, the people and the places and how the weather was.

Hemingway, Ernest

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

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

Byron, Lord

The power of a text is different when it is read from when it is copied out. Only the copied text thus commands the soul of him who is occupied with it, whereas the mere reader never discovers the new aspects of his inner self that are opened by the text, that road cut through the interior jungle forever closing behind it: because the reader follows the movement of his mind in the free flight of day-dreaming, whereas the copier submits it to command.

Benjamin, Walter

10.

Everywhere I have sought rest and not found it, except sitting in a corner by myself with a little book.

Kempis, Thomas

11.

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

Hubbard, Elbert

12.

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

13.

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

Lichtenberg, Georg C.

14.

The successful Accelerated Reader is able to read larger than normal blocks or bites of the printed page with each eye stop. He has accepted, without reservation, the philosophy that the most important benefit of reading is the gaining of information, ideas, mental picture and entertainment-not the fretting over words. He has come to the realization that words in and of themselves are for the most part insignificant.

Cutler, Wade E.

15.

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

Chamfort, Sebastien-Roch Nicolas De

16.

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.

17.

He has only half learned the art of reading who has not added to it the more refined art of skipping and skimming.

Balfour, Arthur James

18.

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

19.

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

20.

After all manner of professors have done their best for us, the place we are to get knowledge is in books. The true university of these days is a collection of books.

Carlyle, Thomas

21.

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

Mccay, James T.

22.

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

Marcel, Anthony

23.

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

Lee, Spike

24.

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.

25.

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

Blackie, Professor

26.

The only books that influence us are those for which we are ready, and which have gone a little farther down our particular path than we have yet got ourselves.

Forster, Edward M.

27.

After all, the world is not a stage -- not to me: nor a theatre: nor a show-house of any sort. And art, especially novels, are not little theatres where the reader sits aloft and watches... and sighs, commiserates, condones and smiles. That's what you want a book to be: because it leaves you so safe and superior, with your two-dollar ticket to the show. And that's what my books are not and never will be. Whoever reads me will be in the thick of the scrimmage, and if he doesn't like it -- if he wants a safe seat in the audience -- let him read someone else.

Lawrence, D. H.

28.

Every abridgement of a good book is a fool abridged.

Montaigne, Michel Eyquem De

29.

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

Hunt, Leigh

30.

A book might be written on the injustice of the just.

Hope, Anthony

31.

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

Mencken, H. L.

32.

Fiction reveals truth that reality obscures.

West, Jessamyn

33.

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

34.

When I get a little money, I buy books; and if any is left I buy food and clothes.

Erasmus, Desiderius

35.

No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader.

Frost, Robert

36.

To read too many books is harmful.

Zedong, Mao

37.

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

38.

The multitude of books is a great evil. There is no limit to this fever for writing.

Luther, Martin

39.

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

Twain, Mark

40.

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

41.

To feel most beautifully alive means to be reading something beautiful, ready always to apprehend in the flow of language the sudden flash of poetry.

Bachelard, Gaston

42.

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

Lichtenberg, Georg C.

43.

To read well, that is, to read true books in a true spirit, is a noble exercise, and one that will task the reader more than any other exercise which the customs of the day esteem. It requires a training such as the athletes underwent, the steady intention almost of the whole life to this object.

Thoreau, Henry David

44.

The great American novel has not only already been written, it has already been rejected.

Dane, Frank

45.

What is a diary as a rule? A document useful to the person who keeps it. Dull to the contemporary who reads it and invaluable to the student, centuries afterwards, who treasures it.

Terry, Helen

46.

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

Porter, Noah

47.

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

Bulwer-Lytton, Edward G.

48.

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

Maclennan, Hugh

49.

I know every book of mine by its smell, and I have but to put my nose between the pages to be reminded of all sorts of things.