Motivational Quotes

Books - reading

Nine-tenths of the existing books are nonsense and the clever books are the refutation of that nonsense.

- Disraeli, Benjamin

Best Quotes about Books - reading

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

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

Barstow, Stan

The books one has written in the past have two surprises in store: one couldn't write them again, and wouldn't want to.

Rostand, Jean

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

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

Trollope, Anthony

Reading is a basic tool in the living of a good life.

Adler, Mortimer J.

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

Asimov, Isaac

Today a reader, tomorrow a leader.

Fusselman, W.

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

Erasmus, Desiderius

10.

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

Schopenhauer, Arthur

11.

A good title is the title of a successful book.

Chandler, Raymond

12.

Books are those faithful mirrors that reflect to our mind the minds of sages and heroes.

Gibbon, Edward

13.

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

Whitman, Walt

14.

I used to walk to school with my nose buried in a book.

Coolio

15.

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

Harington, John

16.

Books are standing counselors and preachers, always at hand, and always disinterested; having this advantage over oral instructors, that they are ready to repeat their lesson as often as we please.

Chambers, Oswald

17.

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

Pascal, Blaise

18.

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

19.

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

Spielberg, Steven

20.

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

Faulkner, William

21.

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

22.

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

Marcel, Anthony

23.

A library is thought in cold storage.

Samuel, Herbert

24.

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

25.

No entertainment is so cheap as reading, nor is any pleasure so lasting.

Montagu, Lady Mary Wortley

26.

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

Belloc, Hilaire

27.

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

Carey, Joyce

28.

I am what libraries and librarians have made me, with little assistance from a professor of Greek and poets.

Sandwell, B. K.

29.

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

30.

The good parts of a book may be only something a writer is lucky enough to overhear or it may be the wreck of his whole damn life --and one is as good as the other.

Hemingway, Ernest

31.

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

32.

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

33.

There is creative reading as well as creative writing.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

34.

Here, my dear Lucy, hide these books. Quick, quick! Fling Peregrine Pickle under the toilette --throw Roderick Random into the closet --put The Innocent Adultery into The Whole Duty of Man; thrust Lord Aimworth under the sofa! cram Ovid behind the bolster; there --put The Man of Feeling into your pocket. Now for them.

Sheridan, Richard Brinsley

35.

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

Maugham, W. Somerset

36.

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

Twain, Mark

37.

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

Mansfield, Katherine

38.

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

39.

This book is not to be tossed lightly aside, but to be hurled with great force.

Parker, Dorothy

40.

Footnotes are the finer-suckered surfaces that allow testicular paragraphs to hold fast to the wider reality of the library.

Baker, Nicholson

41.

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

42.

Next, in importance to books are their titles.

Davies, Paul

43.

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

Hope, Anthony

44.

Prerequisite for rereadability in books: that they be forgettable.

Rostand, Jean

45.

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

46.

I love to lose myself in other men's minds. When I am not walking, I am reading. I cannot sit and think; books think for me.

Lamb, Charles

47.

A house is not a home unless it contains food and fire for the mind as well as the body.

Fuller, Margaret

48.

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

49.

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

50.

Books are lighthouses erected in the great sea of time.

Whipple, Edwin P.