Motivational Quotes

Books - reading

If a book comes from the heart it will contrive to reach other hearts. All art and author craft are of small account to that.

- Carlyle, Thomas

Best Quotes about Books - reading

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

Secondat, Charles de

The world may be full of fourth-rate writers but it's also full of fourth-rate readers.

Barstow, Stan

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

Belloc, Hilaire

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

Barrett, E.S.

No man understands a deep book until he has seen and lived at least part of its contents.

Pound, Ezra

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

Asimov, Isaac

Books are but waste paper unless we spend in action the wisdom we get from thought -- asleep. When we are weary of the living, we may repair to the dead, who have nothing of peevishness, pride, or design in their conversation.

Collier, Jeremy

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

Chamfort, Sebastien-Roch Nicolas De

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

Luther, Martin

10.

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

Butler, Samuel

11.

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

Gibbon, Edward

12.

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

Hope, Anthony

13.

Reading is to the mind what exercise is to the body. It is wholesome and bracing for the mind to have its faculties kept on the stretch.

Steele, Sir Richard

14.

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

Twain, Mark

15.

The reading of all good books is like a conversation with all the finest men of past centuries.

Descartes, Rene

16.

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

Vaneigem, Raoul

17.

Five daily newspapers arrive in my California driveway. The New York times and the Wall Street Journal are supplemented by three local papers. As for magazines, I read, or at least skim, Business Week, Forbes, The Economist, INC; Industry Week, Fortune. Other subscriptions include Sales and Marketing Management, Modern Health Care, Progressive Grocer, High Tech Business, and Slaon Management Review from MIT. I religiously read Business Tokyo, Asia Week, and Far Eastern Economic Review. I glance at Newsweek and Time ... but I devour the New Republic, Policy Review, Foreign Affairs, The Washington Monthly, and Public Interest. How about books? A dozen or more each month.

Peters, Thomas J.

18.

'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

19.

A good title is the title of a successful book.

Chandler, Raymond

20.

A person who publishes a book appears willfully in public with his pants down.

Millay, Edna St. Vincent

21.

For a good book has this quality, that it is not merely a petrifaction of its author, but that once it has been tossed behind, like Deucalion's little stone, it acquires a separate and vivid life of its own.

Lejeune, Caroline

22.

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

Carey, Joyce

23.

Books are lighthouses erected in the great sea of time.

Whipple, Edwin P.

24.

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.

25.

The Brahmins say that in their books there are many predictions of times in which it will rain. But press those books as strongly as you can, you can not get out of them a drop of water. So you can not get out of all the books that contain the best precepts the smallest good deed.

Tolstoy, Count Leo

26.

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

27.

If a book comes from the heart it will contrive to reach other hearts. All art and author craft are of small account to that.

Carlyle, Thomas

28.

All the known world, excepting only savage nations, is governed by books.

Voltaire

29.

Until I feared I would lose it, I never loved to read. One does not love breathing.

Lee, Harper

30.

Some of the most famous books are the least worth reading. Their fame was due to their having done something that needed to be doing in their day. The work is done and the virtue of the book has expired.

Morely, John

31.

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

32.

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

Faulkner, William

33.

Books constitute capital. A library book lasts as long as a house, for hundreds of years. It is not, then, an article of mere consumption but fairly of capital, and often in the case of professional men, setting out in life, it is their only capital.

Jefferson, Thomas

34.

The pleasure of reading is doubled when one lives with another who shares the same books.

Mansfield, Katherine

35.

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

36.

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

37.

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.

38.

Begin to read a book that will help you move toward your dream.

Brown, Les

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.

She could give herself up to the written word as naturally as a good dancer to music or a fine swimmer to water. The only difficulty was that after finishing the last sentence she was left with a feeling at once hollow and uncomfortably full. Exactly like indigestion.

Rhys, Jean

41.

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

Mccay, James T.

42.

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

43.

He that loves a book will never want a faithful friend, a wholesome counselor, a cheerful companion, an effectual comforter. By study, by reading, by thinking, one may innocently divert and pleasantly entertain himself, as in all weathers, as in all fortunes.

Barrow

44.

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

Colton, Charles Caleb

45.

The man who does not read books has no advantage over the man that can not read them.

Twain, Mark

46.

Old books, you know well, are books of the world's youth, and new books are the fruits of its age.

Holmes, Oliver Wendell

47.

What is reading, but silent conversation.

Landor, Walter Savage

48.

Beware of the person of one book.

Aquinas, St. Thomas

49.

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

Harington, John

50.

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