Motivational Quotes

Books - reading

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

- Erasmus, Desiderius

Best Quotes about Books - reading

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

The more sins you confess, the more books you will sell.

Proverb, American

Fiction reveals truth that reality obscures.

West, Jessamyn

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

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

Barstow, Stan

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

Ruskin, John

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

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

Carlyle, Thomas

In science, read by preference the newest works. In literature, read the oldest. The classics are always modern.

Lytton, Lord Edward

10.

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

11.

I am a part of everything that I have read.

Kieran, John

12.

A book is a part of life, a manifestation of life, just as much as a tree or a horse or a star. It obeys its own rhythms, its own laws, whether it be a novel, a play, or a diary. The deep, hidden rhythm of life is always there -- that of the pulse, the heart beat.

Miller, Henry

13.

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

14.

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

Rohn, Jim

15.

To read too many books is harmful.

Zedong, Mao

16.

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

Porter, Noah

17.

One half who graduate from college never read another book.

True, Herbert

18.

A wicked book cannot repent.

Proverb

19.

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

Lawrence, D. H.

20.

A good book is the very essence of a good man. His virtues survive in it, while the foibles and faults of his actual life are forgotten. All the goodly company of the excellent and great sit around my table, or look down on me from yonder shelves, waiting patiently to answer my questions and enrich me with their wisdom. A precious book is a foretaste of immortality.

Cuyler, Theodore L.

21.

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

Voltaire

22.

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

Frost, Robert

23.

There is a set of religious, or rather moral, writings which teach that virtue is the certain road to happiness, and vice to misery in this world. A very wholesome and comfortable doctrine, and to which we have but one objection, namely, that it is not true.

Fielding, Henry

24.

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

25.

A bad book is as much of a labor to write as a good one; it comes as sincerely from the author's soul.

Huxley, Aldous

26.

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

Wilde, Oscar

27.

I always like to look on the optimistic side of life, but I am realistic enough to know that life is a complex matter.

Disney, Walt

28.

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

29.

Today a reader, tomorrow a leader.

Fusselman, W.

30.

When the book comes out it may hurt you -- but in order for me to do it, it had to hurt me first. I can only tell you about yourself as much as I can face about myself.

Baldwin, James

31.

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.

32.

I wish I could write a beautiful book to break those hearts that are soon to cease to exist: a book of faith and small neat worlds and of people who live by the philosophies of popular songs.

33.

Books are lighthouses erected in the great sea of time.

Whipple, Edwin P.

34.

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

35.

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

Montagu, Lady Mary Wortley

36.

Books are the blessed chloroform of the mind.

Chambers, Robert

37.

I divide all readers into two classes: those who read to remember and those who read to forget.

Phelps, William Lyon

38.

Many books require no thought from those who read them, and for a very simple reason: they made no such demand upon those who wrote them. Those works, therefore, are the most valuable, that set our thinking faculties in the fullest operation. understand them.

Clarendon

39.

There are worse crimes than burning books. One of them is not reading them.

Brodsky, Joseph

40.

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

41.

How many a man has dated a new era in his life from the reading of a book! The book exists for us, perchance, that will explain our miracles and reveal new ones. The at present unutterable things we may find somewhere uttered.

Thoreau, Henry David

42.

The age of the book is almost gone.

Steiner, George

43.

What is reading, but silent conversation.

Landor, Walter Savage

44.

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

Hubbard, Elbert

45.

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

Blackie, Professor

46.

Do we write books so that they shall merely be read? Don't we also write them for employment in the household? For one that is read from start to finish, thousands are leafed through, other thousands lie motionless, others are jammed against mouseholes, thrown at rats, others are stood on, sat on, drummed on, have gingerbread baked on them or are used to light pipes.

Lichtenberg, Georg C.

47.

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

Bulwer-Lytton, Edward G.

48.

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

Fuller, Margaret

49.

There are books so alive that you're always afraid that while you weren't reading, the book has gone and changed, has shifted like a river; while you went on living, it went on living too, and like a river moved on and moved away. No one has stepped twice into the same river. But did anyone ever step twice into the same book?

Tsvetaeva, Marina

50.

There is creative reading as well as creative writing.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo