Motivational Quotes

Books - reading

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

Best Quotes about Books - reading

What gunpowder did for war the printing press has done for the mind.

Phillips, Wendell

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.

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

Rohn, Jim

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

Sandwell, B. K.

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

Carlyle, Thomas

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

Blackie, Professor

The Bible remained for me a book of books, still divine -- but divine in the sense that all great books are divine which teach men how to live righteously.

Keith, Sir Arthur

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

Books, like friends, should be few and well chosen. Like friends, too, we should return to them again and again for, like true friends, they will never fail us -- never cease to instruct -- never cloy.

Colton, Charles Caleb

10.

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

11.

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

Lee, Harper

12.

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

Hunt, Leigh

13.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

14.

Education... has produced a vast population able to read but unable to distinguish what is worth reading, an easy prey to sensations and cheap appeals.

Trevelyan, G. M.

15.

Most books today seemed to have been written overnight from books read the day before.

Chamfort, Sebastien-Roch Nicolas De

16.

I don't think any good book is based on factual experience. Bad books are about things the writer already knew before he wrote them.

Fuentes, Carlos

17.

Does there, I wonder, exist a being who has read all, or approximately all, that the person of average culture is supposed to have read, and that not to have read is a social sin? If such a being does exist, surely he is an old, a very old man.

Bennett, Arnold

18.

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

19.

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

Gibbon, Edward

20.

Fiction reveals truth that reality obscures.

West, Jessamyn

21.

Books succeed, and lives fail.

Browning, Elizabeth Barrett

22.

I am a part of everything that I have read.

Kieran, John

23.

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

24.

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

25.

Much reading is an oppression of the mind, and extinguishes the natural candle, which is the reason of so many senseless scholars in the world.

Penn, William

26.

After all manner of professors have done their best for us, the place we are to get knowledge is in books. The true university of these days is a collection of books.

Carlyle, Thomas

27.

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

Frost, Robert

28.

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

29.

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

Forster, Edward M.

30.

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

31.

What we become depends on what we read after all the professors have finished with us. The greatest university of all is the collection of books.

Carlyle, Thomas

32.

Everywhere I have sought rest and not found it, except sitting in a corner by myself with a little book.

Kempis, Thomas

33.

The newest books are those that never grow old.

Jackson, George Holbrook

34.

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

Rohn, Jim

35.

Reading the Scriptures is an uplifting experience.

36.

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

37.

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

Schopenhauer, Arthur

38.

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

Montagu, Lady Mary Wortley

39.

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

Bulwer-Lytton, Edward G.

40.

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

Luther, Martin

41.

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

42.

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

43.

Beware of the person of one book.

Aquinas, St. Thomas

44.

The age of the book is almost gone.

Steiner, George

45.

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

Byron, Lord

46.

Reading furnishes the mind only with material for knowledge; it is thinking that makes what we read ours.

Locke, John

47.

Readers are plentiful: thinkers are rare.

Martineau, Harriet

48.

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

Critchfield, Jim

49.

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

50.

Books are the best of things if well used; if abused, among the worst. They are good for nothing but to inspire. I had better never see a book than be warped by its attraction clean out of my own orbit, and made a satellite instead of a system.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo