Motivational Quotes

Books - reading

The newest books are those that never grow old.

- Jackson, George Holbrook

Best Quotes about Books - reading

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

Lytton, Lord Edward

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

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

Phelps, William Lyon

Reading is equivalent to thinking with someone else's head instead of with one's own.

Schopenhauer, Arthur

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

Trollope, Anthony

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

Most books, like their authors, are born to die; of only a few books can it be said that death has no dominion over them; they live, and their influence lives forever.

Swartz, J.

It is from books that wise people derive consolation in the troubles of life.

Hugo, Victor

'Tis pleasant, sure, to see one's name in print; A book's a book, although there's nothing in it.

Byron, Lord

10.

Books are not absolutely dead things, but do contain a certain potency of life in them, to be as active as the soul whose progeny they are; they preserve, as in a vial, the purest efficacy and extraction of the living intellect that bred them.

Milton, John

11.

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

Twain, Mark

12.

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

Twain, Mark

13.

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

Asimov, Isaac

14.

If I have not read a book before, it is, for all intents and purposes, new to me whether it was printed yesterday or three hundred years ago.

Hazlitt, William

15.

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

Mansfield, Katherine

16.

The multitude of books is a great evil. There is no limit to this fever for writing.

Luther, Martin

17.

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

Chappell, Warren

18.

Reading is to the mind what exercise is to the body. It is wholesome and bracing for the mind to have its faculties kept on the stretch.

Steele, Sir Richard

19.

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

Proverb, American

20.

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

Montagu, Lady Mary Wortley

21.

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

22.

A wicked book cannot repent.

Proverb

23.

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

Lee, Harper

24.

The man who does not read books has no advantage over the man that can not read them.

Twain, Mark

25.

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

Forster, Edward M.

26.

There is no robber worse than a bad book.

Proverb, Italian

27.

There is creative reading as well as creative writing.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

28.

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

29.

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

30.

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

Marcel, Anthony

31.

There is more treasure in books than in all the pirates loot on Treasure Island and best of all, you can enjoy these riches every day of your life.

Disney, Walt

32.

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

33.

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

Sandwell, B. K.

34.

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

35.

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

36.

To sit alone in the lamplight with a book spread out before you hold intimate converse with men of unseen generations -- such is pleasure beyond compare.

Kenko, Yoshida

37.

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

38.

I am a part of everything that I have read.

Kieran, John

39.

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

40.

The great American novel has not only already been written, it has already been rejected.

Dane, Frank

41.

Begin to read a book that will help you move toward your dream.

Brown, Les

42.

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

Pascal, Blaise

43.

After all, the world is not a stage -- not to me: nor a theatre: nor a show-house of any sort. And art, especially novels, are not little theatres where the reader sits aloft and watches... and sighs, commiserates, condones and smiles. That's what you want a book to be: because it leaves you so safe and superior, with your two-dollar ticket to the show. And that's what my books are not and never will be. Whoever reads me will be in the thick of the scrimmage, and if he doesn't like it -- if he wants a safe seat in the audience -- let him read someone else.

Lawrence, D. H.

44.

He has only half learned the art of reading who has not added to it the more refined art of skipping and skimming.

Balfour, Arthur James

45.

I feel like I'm drowning. Every night, I'm carrying home loads of things to read but I'm too exhausted. I keep clipping things and Xeroxing them and planning to read them eventually, but I just end up throwing it all away and feeling guilty.

Levine, Ghita

46.

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

Gibbon, Edward

47.

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

48.

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

49.

Happy is he who has laid up in his youth, and held fast in all fortune, a genuine and passionate love for reading.

Choate, Rufus

50.

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