Motivational Quotes

Books - reading

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

Best Quotes about Books - reading

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

A good title is the title of a successful book.

Chandler, Raymond

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

The book to read is not the one which thinks for you, but the one which makes you think. No book in the world equals the Bible for that.

Mccosh

You should read books like you take medicine, by advice, and not by advertisement.

Ruskin, John

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

The newest books are those that never grow old.

Jackson, George Holbrook

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

There was a time when the world acted on books; now books act on the world.

Joubert, Joseph

10.

A bad book is the worse that it cannot repent. It has not been the devil's policy to keep the masses of mankind in ignorance; but finding that they will read, he is doing all in his power to poison their books.

Kirk, E.N.

11.

I heard his library burned down and both books were destroyed -- and one of them hadn't even been colored in yet.

Dawkins, John

12.

I read the newspaper avidly. It is my one form of continuous fiction.

Bevan, Aneurin

13.

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

14.

This is not a book. This is libel, slander, defamation of character. This is not a book, in the ordinary sense of the word. No, this is a prolonged insult, a gob of spit in the face of Art, a kick in the pants to God, Man, Destiny, Time, Love, Beauty... what you will. I am going to sing for you, a little off key perhaps, but I will sing.

Miller, Henry

15.

You are wise, witty and wonderful, but you spend too much time reading this sort of stuff.

Critchfield, Jim

16.

The book you don't read won't help.

Rohn, Jim

17.

To use books rightly, is to go to them for help; to appeal to them when our own knowledge and power fail; to be led by them into wider sight and purer conception than our own, and to receive from them the united sentence of the judges and councils of all time, against our solitary and unstable opinions.

Ruskin, John

18.

What gunpowder did for war the printing press has done for the mind.

Phillips, Wendell

19.

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

Belloc, Hilaire

20.

I am a part of everything that I have read.

Kieran, John

21.

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

Hood, Thomas

22.

Today a reader, tomorrow a leader.

Fusselman, W.

23.

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.

24.

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

25.

The books one reads in childhood, and perhaps most of all the bad and good bad books, create in one's mind a sort of false map of the world, a series of fabulous countries into which one can retreat at odd moments throughout the rest of life, and which in some cases can survive a visit to the real countries which they are supposed to represent.

Orwell, George

26.

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

27.

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

Wilde, Oscar

28.

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

29.

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

Maugham, W. Somerset

30.

The books that everybody admires are those that nobody reads.

France, Anatole

31.

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.

32.

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

Holmes, Oliver Wendell

33.

Of all the ways of acquiring books, writing them oneself is regarded as the most praiseworthy method. Writers are really people who write books not because they are poor, but because they are dissatisfied with the books which they could buy but do not like.

Benjamin, Walter

34.

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

35.

A book may be compared to your neighbor: if it be good, it cannot last too long; if bad, you cannot get rid of it too early.

Brooke, Rupert

36.

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

37.

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

38.

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

39.

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

Kempis, Thomas

40.

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

41.

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

Forster, Edward M.

42.

Read Homer once, and you can read no more. For all books else appear so mean, and so poor. Verse will seem prose; but still persist to read, and Homer will be all the books you need.

Buckingham, Duke of

43.

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

Locke, John

44.

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

Lichtenberg, Georg C.

45.

The flood of print has turned reading into a process of gulping rather than savoring

Chappell, Warren

46.

There is no robber worse than a bad book.

Proverb, Italian

47.

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

Mencken, H. L.

48.

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

49.

A multitude of books distracts the mind.

Socrates

50.

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.