Motivational Quotes

Books - reading

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

- Mencken, H. L.

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

The books that everybody admires are those that nobody reads.

France, Anatole

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

Brown, Les

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

Mansfield, Katherine

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

Twain, Mark

A wicked book cannot repent.

Proverb

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

Books are divided into two classes, the books of the hour and the books of all time.

Ruskin, John

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

10.

The books one has written in the past have two surprises in store: one couldn't write them again, and wouldn't want to.

Rostand, Jean

11.

The successful Accelerated Reader is able to read larger than normal blocks or bites of the printed page with each eye stop. He has accepted, without reservation, the philosophy that the most important benefit of reading is the gaining of information, ideas, mental picture and entertainment-not the fretting over words. He has come to the realization that words in and of themselves are for the most part insignificant.

Cutler, Wade E.

12.

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

13.

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

Dane, Frank

14.

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

Sandwell, B. K.

15.

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.

16.

There is creative reading as well as creative writing.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

17.

Reading the Scriptures is an uplifting experience.

18.

Many books require no thought from those who read them, and for a very simple reason: they made no such demand upon those who wrote them. Those works, therefore, are the most valuable, that set our thinking faculties in the fullest operation. understand them.

Clarendon

19.

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

Barstow, Stan

20.

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

21.

A person of mature years and ripe development, who is expecting nothing from literature but the corroboration and renewal of past ideas, may find satisfaction in a lucidity so complete as to occasion no imaginative excitement, but young and ambitious students are not content with it. They seek the excitement because they are capable of the growth that it accompanies.

Cooley, Charles Horton

22.

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

Parker, Dorothy

23.

No story is the same to us after a lapse of time; or rather we who read it are no longer the same interpreters.

Eliot, George

24.

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

25.

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

26.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

27.

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

Hadas, Moses

28.

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

Locke, John

29.

Any book that helps a child to form a habit of reading, to make reading one of his deep and continuing needs, is good for him.

McKenna, Richard

30.

Digressions, incontestably, are the sunshine; they are the life, the soul of reading! Take them out of this book, for instance, --you might as well take the book along with them; --one cold external winter would reign in every page of it; restore them to the writer; --he steps forth like a bridegroom, --bids All-hail; brings in variety, and forbids the appetite to fail.

Sterne, Laurence

31.

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

32.

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

33.

God be thanked for books; they are the voices of the distant and the dead, and make us heirs of the spiritual life of past ages.

Channing, William Ellery

34.

Reading makes immigrants of us all. It takes us away from home, but more important, it finds homes for us everywhere.

Rochman, Hazel

35.

A novel is a mirror carried along a main road.

Stendhal, Henri B.

36.

A book worth reading is worth buying.

Ruskin, John

37.

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

38.

A novel points out that the world consists entirely of exceptions.

Carey, Joyce

39.

Books are standing counselors and preachers, always at hand, and always disinterested; having this advantage over oral instructors, that they are ready to repeat their lesson as often as we please.

Chambers, Oswald

40.

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

Lowell, James Russell

41.

One sheds one's sicknesses in books -- repeats and presents again one's emotions, to be master of them.

Lawrence, D. H.

42.

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

43.

When I am dead, I hope it may be said: His sins were scarlet, but his books were read.

Belloc, Hilaire

44.

Books succeed, and lives fail.

Browning, Elizabeth Barrett

45.

Books that you carry to the fire, and hold readily in your hand, are most useful after all.

Johnson, Samuel

46.

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

Erasmus, Desiderius

47.

A novel is never anything, but a philosophy put into images.

Camus, Albert

48.

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

Baker, Nicholson

49.

With one day's reading a man may have the key in his hands.

Pound, Ezra

50.

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