Motivational Quotes

Books - reading

Except a living man there is nothing more wonderful than a book! a message to us from the dead -- from human souls we never saw, who lived, perhaps, thousands of miles away. And yet these, in those little sheets of paper, speak to us, arouse us, terrify us, teach us, comfort us, open their hearts to us as brothers.

- Kingsley, Charles

Best Quotes about Books - reading

Books had instant replay long before televised sports.

Williams, Bert

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

Until it is kindled by a spirit as flamingly alive as the one which gave it birth a book is dead to us. Words divested of their magic are but dead hieroglyphs.

Miller, Henry

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

Asimov, Isaac

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.

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

Pascal, Blaise

The good of a book lies in its being read. A book is made up of signs that speak of other signs, which in their turn speak of things. Without an eye to read them, a book contains signs that produce no concepts; therefore it is dumb.

Eco, Umberto

A good book is the very essence of a good man. His virtues survive in it, while the foibles and faults of his actual life are forgotten. All the goodly company of the excellent and great sit around my table, or look down on me from yonder shelves, waiting patiently to answer my questions and enrich me with their wisdom. A precious book is a foretaste of immortality.

Cuyler, Theodore L.

Next, in importance to books are their titles.

Davies, Paul

10.

A house is not a home unless it contains food and fire for the mind as well as the body.

Fuller, Margaret

11.

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

Sandwell, B. K.

12.

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

Twain, Mark

13.

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.

14.

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

Barstow, Stan

15.

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

16.

A book is a part of life, a manifestation of life, just as much as a tree or a horse or a star. It obeys its own rhythms, its own laws, whether it be a novel, a play, or a diary. The deep, hidden rhythm of life is always there -- that of the pulse, the heart beat.

Miller, Henry

17.

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

18.

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

Mcluhan, Marshall

19.

The words of my book nothing, the drift of it everything.

Whitman, Walt

20.

I feel a kind of reverence for the first books of young authors. There is so much aspiration in them, so much audacious hope and trembling fear, so much of the heart's history, that all errors and shortcomings are for a while lost sight of in the amiable self assertion of youth.

Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth

21.

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

Jackson, Holbrook

22.

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.

23.

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

24.

A book that is shut is but a block.

Fuller, Thomas

25.

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

Harington, John

26.

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

27.

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

28.

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

29.

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

Phillips, Wendell

30.

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

31.

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

Schopenhauer, Arthur

32.

I would sooner read a timetable or a catalog than nothing at all.

Maugham, W. Somerset

33.

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

34.

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

35.

Readers are less and less seen as mere non-writers, the subhuman other or flawed derivative of the author; the lack of a pen is no longer a shameful mark of secondary status but a positively enabling space, just as within every writer can be seen to lurk, as a repressed but contaminating antithesis, a reader.

Eagleton, Terry

36.

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

Temple, Sir William

37.

The chief knowledge that a man gets from reading books is the knowledge that very few of them are worth reading.

Mencken, H. L.

38.

I know every book of mine by its smell, and I have but to put my nose between the pages to be reminded of all sorts of things.

Gissing, George Robert

39.

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

40.

Books and marriage go ill together.

Moliere

41.

Books are not men and yet they stay alive.

Benet, Stephen Vincent

42.

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

43.

He had read much, if one considers his long life; but his contemplation was much more than his reading. He was wont to say that if he had read as much as other men he should have known no more than other men.

Aubrey, John

44.

A wicked book cannot repent.

Proverb

45.

The newest books are those that never grow old.

Jackson, George Holbrook

46.

Every abridgement of a good book is a fool abridged.

Montaigne, Michel Eyquem De

47.

I always begin at the left with the opening word of the sentence and read toward the right and I recommend this method.

Thurber, James

48.

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

Maclennan, Hugh

49.

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

50.

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

Lytton, Lord Edward