Motivational Quotes

Books - reading

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

- Jackson, Holbrook

Best Quotes about Books - reading

When we read a story, we inhabit it. The covers of the book are like a roof and four walls. What is to happen next will take place within the four walls of the story. And this is possible because the story's voice makes everything its own.

Berger, John

Don't just read the easy stuff. You may be entertained by it, but you will never grow from it.

Rohn, Jim

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

From the moment I picked your book up until I laid it down I was convulsed with laughter. Some day I intend reading it.

Marx, Groucho

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

Hadas, Moses

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

Sandwell, B. K.

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.

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

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

10.

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

Hood, Thomas

11.

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

12.

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.

13.

Without books the development of civilization would have been impossible. They are the engines of change, windows on the world, Lighthouses as the poet said erected in the sea of time. They are companions, teachers, magicians, bankers of the treasures of the mind, Books are humanity in print.

Schopenhauer, Arthur

14.

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.

15.

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

Rohn, Jim

16.

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

Brown, Les

17.

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

Erasmus, Desiderius

18.

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

Twain, Mark

19.

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.

20.

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

Blackie, Professor

21.

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

22.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

23.

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

Hubbard, Elbert

24.

The mere brute pleasure of reading --the sort of pleasure a cow must have in grazing.

Chesterton, Gilbert K.

25.

The good parts of a book may be only something a writer is lucky enough to overhear or it may be the wreck of his whole damn life --and one is as good as the other.

Hemingway, Ernest

26.

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

27.

Everything in the world exists to end up in a book.

Mallarme, Stephane

28.

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

Dawkins, John

29.

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

Joubert, Joseph

30.

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

Bulwer-Lytton, Edward G.

31.

A novel must be exceptionally good to live as long as the average cat.

Maclennan, Hugh

32.

Miss a meal if you have to, but don't miss a book.

Rohn, Jim

33.

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

34.

A dose of poison can do its work but once. A bad book can go on poisoning minds for generations.

Murray, William

35.

Beware you be not swallowed up in books! An ounce of love is worth a pound of knowledge.

Wesley, John

36.

The age of the book is almost gone.

Steiner, George

37.

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

38.

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

Baker, Nicholson

39.

Here, my dear Lucy, hide these books. Quick, quick! Fling Peregrine Pickle under the toilette --throw Roderick Random into the closet --put The Innocent Adultery into The Whole Duty of Man; thrust Lord Aimworth under the sofa! cram Ovid behind the bolster; there --put The Man of Feeling into your pocket. Now for them.

Sheridan, Richard Brinsley

40.

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

41.

If a book comes from the heart it will contrive to reach other hearts. All art and author craft are of small account to that.

Carlyle, Thomas

42.

The oldest books are still only just out to those who have not read them.

Butler, Samuel

43.

Nine-tenths of the existing books are nonsense and the clever books are the refutation of that nonsense.

Disraeli, Benjamin

44.

A successful book cannot afford to be more than ten percent new.

Mcluhan, Marshall

45.

The lessons taught in great books are misleading. The commerce in life is rarely so simple and never so just.

Brookner, Anita

46.

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

Chappell, Warren

47.

The unread story is not a story; it is little black marks on wood pulp. The reader, reading it, makes it live: a live thing, a story.

Guin, Ursula K. Le

48.

The novel can't compete with cars, the movies, television, and liquor. A guy who's had a good feed and tanked up on good wine gives his old lady a kiss after supper and his day is over. Finished.

Celine, Louis-Ferdinand

49.

He that loves a book will never want a faithful friend, a wholesome counselor, a cheerful companion, an effectual comforter. By study, by reading, by thinking, one may innocently divert and pleasantly entertain himself, as in all weathers, as in all fortunes.

Barrow

50.

I am a part of everything that I have read.

Kieran, John