Motivational Quotes

Books - reading

If I had my way books would not be written in English, but in an exceedingly difficult secret language that only skilled professional readers and story-tellers could interpret. Then people like you would have to go to public halls and pay good prices to hear the professionals decode and read the books aloud for you. This plan would have the advantage of scaring off all amateur authors, retired politicians, country doctors and I-Married-a-Midget writers who would not have the patience to learn the secret language.

- Davies, Robertson

Best Quotes about Books - reading

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

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

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

Hunt, Leigh

A real book is not one that we read, but one that reads us.

Auden, W. H.

A good book is the best of friends, the same today and for ever.

Tupper, Martin

When a book raises your spirit, and inspires you with noble and manly thoughts, seek for no other test of its excellence. It is good, and made by a good workman.

Bruyere, Jean De La

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

We should be as careful of the books we read, as of the company we keep. The dead very often have more power than the living.

Edwards, Tryon

What is reading, but silent conversation.

Landor, Walter Savage

10.

The best effect of any book, is that it excites the reader to self-activity.

Carlyle, Thomas

11.

The newest books are those that never grow old.

Jackson, George Holbrook

12.

One sheds one's sicknesses in books -- repeats and presents again one's emotions, to be master of them.

Lawrence, D. H.

13.

Who kills a man kills a reasonable creature, God's image, but thee who destroys a good book, kills reason itself.

Milton, John

14.

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

Maugham, W. Somerset

15.

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.

16.

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

Rohn, Jim

17.

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

18.

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.

19.

Reading the Scriptures is an uplifting experience.

20.

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

Millay, Edna St. Vincent

21.

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

22.

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

Mansfield, Katherine

23.

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

24.

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

25.

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

26.

The book salesman should be honored because he brings to our attention, as a rule, the very books we need most and neglect most.

Crane, Frank

27.

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

Frost, Robert

28.

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

29.

The words of my book nothing, the drift of it everything.

Whitman, Walt

30.

Books that you carry to the fire, and hold readily in your hand, are most useful after all.

Johnson, Samuel

31.

There is no robber worse than a bad book.

Proverb, Italian

32.

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.

33.

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

Belloc, Hilaire

34.

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

35.

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

36.

The mortality of all inanimate things is terrible to me, but that of books most of all.

Howells, William Dean

37.

The world of books is the most remarkable creation of man nothing else that he builds ever lasts monuments fall; nations perish; civilization grow old and die out; new races build others. But in the world of books are volumes that have seen this happen again and again and yet live on. Still young, still as fresh as the day they were written, still telling men's hearts, of the hearts of men centuries dead.

Day, Clarence

38.

There are people who read too much: bibliobibuli. I know some who are constantly drunk on books, as other men are drunk on whiskey or religion. They wander through this most diverting and stimulating of worlds in a haze, seeing nothing and hearing nothing.

Mencken, H. L.

39.

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

40.

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

41.

Books are the best of things if well used; if abused, among the worst. They are good for nothing but to inspire. I had better never see a book than be warped by its attraction clean out of my own orbit, and made a satellite instead of a system.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

42.

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

43.

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

44.

A novel is a mirror carried along a main road.

Stendhal, Henri B.

45.

A good title is the title of a successful book.

Chandler, Raymond

46.

Does there, I wonder, exist a being who has read all, or approximately all, that the person of average culture is supposed to have read, and that not to have read is a social sin? If such a being does exist, surely he is an old, a very old man.

Bennett, Arnold

47.

A big leather-bound volume makes an ideal razor strap. A thin book is useful to stick under a table with a broken caster to steady it. A large, flat atlas can be used to cover a window with a broken pane. And a thick, old-fashioned heavy book with a clasp is the finest thing in the world to throw at a noisy cat.

Twain, Mark

48.

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

Hubbard, Elbert

49.

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

Marcel, Anthony

50.

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

Asimov, Isaac