Motivational Quotes

Books - reading

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

- Hunt, Leigh

Best Quotes about Books - reading

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

The books we think we ought to read are poky, dull, and dry; The books that we would like to read we are ashamed to buy; The books that people talk about we never can recall; And the books that people give us, oh, they're the worst of all.

Wells, Carolyn

A vacuum of ideas affects people differently than a vacuum of air, otherwise readers of books would be constantly collapsing.

Lichtenberg, Georg C.

To feel most beautifully alive means to be reading something beautiful, ready always to apprehend in the flow of language the sudden flash of poetry.

Bachelard, Gaston

Don't ask me who's influenced me. A lion is made up of the lambs he's digested, and I've been reading all my life.

Seferis, Giorgos

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

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

In any situation, ask yourself: What strengths do I possess that can contribute towards accomplishing something in this situation? Then follow through.

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

10.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

11.

The things I want to know are in books; my best friend is the man who'll get me a book I ain't read.

Lincoln, Abraham

12.

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

Faulkner, William

13.

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

14.

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

Baker, Nicholson

15.

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

Wilde, Oscar

16.

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

Trollope, Anthony

17.

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

18.

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.

19.

Books, books, books had found the secret of a garret-room piled high with cases in my father's name; Piled high, packed large, --where, creeping in and out among the giant fossils of my past, like some small nimble mouse between the ribs of a mastodon, I nibbled here and there at this or that box, pulling through the gap, in heats of terror, haste, victorious joy, the first book first. And how I felt it beat under my pillow, in the morning's dark. An hour before the sun would let me read! My books!

Browning, Elizabeth Barrett

20.

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

Lowell, James Russell

21.

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

22.

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

23.

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

Spielberg, Steven

24.

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

Porter, Noah

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.

Hypocrite reader -- my fellow -- my brother!

Baudelaire, Charles

27.

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

Tupper, Martin

28.

A house without books is like a room without windows. No man has a right to bring up his children without surrounding them with books, if he has the means to buy them. It is a wrong to his family. Children learn to read by being in the presence of books. The love of knowledge comes with reading and grows upon it. And the love of knowledge, in a young mind, is almost always a warrant against the inferior excitement of passions and vices.

Mann, Horace

29.

The failure to read good books both enfeebles the vision and strengthens our most fatal tendency --the belief that the here and now is all there is.

Bloom, Allan

30.

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

Phelps, William Lyon

31.

Read good, big important things.

Noonan, Peggy

32.

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

Parker, Dorothy

33.

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

34.

To learn to read is to light a fire; every syllable that is spelled out is a spark.

Hugo, Victor

35.

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

Gibbon, Edward

36.

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

37.

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

Hood, Thomas

38.

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

Harington, John

39.

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

Adler, Mortimer J.

40.

The worst readers are those who behave like plundering troops: they take away a few things they can use, dirty and confound the remainder, and revile the whole.

Nietzsche, Friedrich

41.

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

Montagu, Lady Mary Wortley

42.

Until I feared I would lose it, I never loved to read. One does not love breathing.

Lee, Harper

43.

My early and invincible love of reading I would not exchange for all the riches of India.

Gibbon, Edward

44.

Books succeed, and lives fail.

Browning, Elizabeth Barrett

45.

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

46.

How can you dare teach a man to read until you've taught him everything else first?

Shaw, George Bernard

47.

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

Forster, Edward M.

48.

The printing press is either the greatest blessing or the greatest curse of modern times, sometimes one forgets which it is.

Barrie, Sir James M.

49.

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