Motivational Quotes

Books - reading

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

- Hubbard, Elbert

Best Quotes about Books - reading

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

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

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

Books are the bees which carry the quickening pollen from one to another mind.

Lowell, James Russell

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

Vaneigem, Raoul

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

Critchfield, Jim

No furniture is so charming as books.

Smith, Sydney

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

Mencken, H. L.

Next, in importance to books are their titles.

Davies, Paul

10.

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

Hunt, Leigh

11.

No matter how busy you may think you are, you must find time for reading, or surrender yourself to self-chosen ignorance.

Townsend, Atwood H.

12.

Some books leave us free and some books make us free.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

13.

Thank you for sending me a copy of your book -- I'll waste no time reading it.

Hadas, Moses

14.

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

15.

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

16.

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

Colton, Charles Caleb

17.

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

Howells, William Dean

18.

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.

19.

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

Wilde, Oscar

20.

Books are the blessed chloroform of the mind.

Chambers, Robert

21.

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

Phelps, William Lyon

22.

A book is a mirror: If an ass peers into it, you can't expect an apostle to look out.

Lichtenberg, Georg C.

23.

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

Barstow, Stan

24.

Who ever converses among old books will be hard to please among the new.

Temple, Sir William

25.

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.

26.

Hypocrite reader -- my fellow -- my brother!

Baudelaire, Charles

27.

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.

28.

Read as you taste fruit or savor wine, or enjoy friendship, love or life.

Jackson, Holbrook

29.

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

Gibbon, Edward

30.

Beware of the person of one book.

Aquinas, St. Thomas

31.

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

32.

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

33.

People are much more willing to lend you books than bookcases.

Twain, Mark

34.

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

35.

The books that everybody admires are those that nobody reads.

France, Anatole

36.

You will find most books worth reading are worth reading twice.

Morely, John

37.

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.

38.

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

39.

You will, I am sure, agree with me that... if page 534 only finds us in the second chapter, the length of the first one must have been really intolerable.

Doyle, Sir Arthur Conan

40.

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.

41.

We are too civil to books. For a few golden sentences we will turn over and actually read a volume of four or five hundred pages.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

42.

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

Chappell, Warren

43.

The books we read should be chosen with great care, that they may be, as an Egyptian king wrote over his library, The medicines of the soul.

Hood, Paxton

44.

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

45.

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

46.

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

47.

The reading or non-reading a book will never keep down a single petticoat.

Byron, Lord

48.

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

Frost, Robert

49.

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.

50.

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