Motivational Quotes

Books - reading

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

- Pound, Ezra

Best Quotes about Books - reading

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

Temple, Sir William

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

Hood, Thomas

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

Erasmus, Desiderius

A man ought to read just as his inclination leads him; for what he reads as a task will do him little good.

Johnson, Samuel

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

Hadas, Moses

Books are masters who instruct us without rods or ferules, without words or anger, without bread or money. If you approach them, they are not asleep; if you seek them, they do not hide; if you blunder, they do not scold; if you are ignorant, they do not laugh at you.

Bury, Richard De

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

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

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

Twain, Mark

10.

There is a set of religious, or rather moral, writings which teach that virtue is the certain road to happiness, and vice to misery in this world. A very wholesome and comfortable doctrine, and to which we have but one objection, namely, that it is not true.

Fielding, Henry

11.

The greatest gift is the passion for reading. It is cheap, it consoles, it distracts, it excites, it gives you knowledge of the world and experience of a wide kind. It is a moral illumination.

Hardwick, Elizabeth

12.

Next, in importance to books are their titles.

Davies, Paul

13.

The newest books are those that never grow old.

Jackson, George Holbrook

14.

A bad book is the worse that it cannot repent. It has not been the devil's policy to keep the masses of mankind in ignorance; but finding that they will read, he is doing all in his power to poison their books.

Kirk, E.N.

15.

The book to read is not the one which thinks for you, but the one which makes you think. No book in the world equals the Bible for that.

Mccosh

16.

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

Brookner, Anita

17.

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

Maugham, W. Somerset

18.

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

Chappell, Warren

19.

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

20.

The reading of all good books is like a conversation with all the finest men of past centuries.

Descartes, Rene

21.

To read too many books is harmful.

Zedong, Mao

22.

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

Murray, William

23.

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

24.

Books are lighthouses erected in the great sea of time.

Whipple, Edwin P.

25.

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

26.

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.

27.

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

28.

What is the most precious, the most exciting smell awaiting you in the house when you return to it after a dozen years or so? The smell of roses, you think? No, moldering books.

Sinyavsky, Andre

29.

As writers become more numerous, it is natural for readers to become more indolent; whence must necessarily arise a desire of attaining knowledge with the greatest possible ease.

Goldsmith, Oliver

30.

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

31.

This is not a book. This is libel, slander, defamation of character. This is not a book, in the ordinary sense of the word. No, this is a prolonged insult, a gob of spit in the face of Art, a kick in the pants to God, Man, Destiny, Time, Love, Beauty... what you will. I am going to sing for you, a little off key perhaps, but I will sing.

Miller, Henry

32.

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

33.

Thy books should, like thy friends, not many be, yet such wherein men may thy judgment see.

Wycherley, William

34.

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

Mansfield, Katherine

35.

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

Rohn, Jim

36.

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.

37.

The tools I need for my work are paper, tobacco, food, and a little whiskey.

Faulkner, William

38.

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

Hubbard, Elbert

39.

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

40.

A library is thought in cold storage.

Samuel, Herbert

41.

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

42.

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

43.

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

Schopenhauer, Arthur

44.

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

45.

We ought to reverence books; to look on them as useful and mighty things. If they are good and true, whether they are about religion, politics, farming, trade, law, or medicine, they are the message of Christ, the maker of all things -- the teacher of all truth.

Kingsley, Charles

46.

To use books rightly, is to go to them for help; to appeal to them when our own knowledge and power fail; to be led by them into wider sight and purer conception than our own, and to receive from them the united sentence of the judges and councils of all time, against our solitary and unstable opinions.

Ruskin, John

47.

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

Ruskin, John

48.

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

Locke, John

49.

Reading is a basic tool in the living of a good life.

Adler, Mortimer J.

50.

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