Motivational Quotes

Books - reading

Prerequisite for rereadability in books: that they be forgettable.

- Rostand, Jean

Best Quotes about Books - reading

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

Phillips, Wendell

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

Prerequisite for rereadability in books: that they be forgettable.

Rostand, Jean

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

Books are those faithful mirrors that reflect to our mind the minds of sages and heroes.

Gibbon, Edward

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

Sandwell, B. K.

All the known world, excepting only savage nations, is governed by books.

Voltaire

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

Very young children eat their books, literally devouring their contents. This is one reason for the scarcity of first editions of Alice in Wonderland and other favorites of the nursery.

Rosenbach, A. S. W.

10.

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

Mallarme, Stephane

11.

Beware of the person of one book.

Aquinas, St. Thomas

12.

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

13.

Of all the ways of acquiring books, writing them oneself is regarded as the most praiseworthy method. Writers are really people who write books not because they are poor, but because they are dissatisfied with the books which they could buy but do not like.

Benjamin, Walter

14.

There is no such thing as a moral book or an immoral book. Books are well written or badly written. That is all.

Wilde, Oscar

15.

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

16.

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

Lee, Harper

17.

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

Bulwer-Lytton, Edward G.

18.

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

19.

What is a diary as a rule? A document useful to the person who keeps it. Dull to the contemporary who reads it and invaluable to the student, centuries afterwards, who treasures it.

Terry, Helen

20.

The books that everybody admires are those that nobody reads.

France, Anatole

21.

It is from books that wise people derive consolation in the troubles of life.

Hugo, Victor

22.

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.

23.

Then I though of reading -- the nice and subtle happiness of reading ... this joy not dulled by age, this polite and unpunishable vice, this selfish, serene, lifelong intoxication.

Smith, Logan Pearsall

24.

Books are but waste paper unless we spend in action the wisdom we get from thought -- asleep. When we are weary of the living, we may repair to the dead, who have nothing of peevishness, pride, or design in their conversation.

Collier, Jeremy

25.

The reason a writer writes a book is to forget a book and the reason a reader reads one is to remember it.

Wolfe, Thomas

26.

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

Carey, Joyce

27.

A multitude of books distracts the mind.

Socrates

28.

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

29.

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

Temple, Sir William

30.

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

Blackie, Professor

31.

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

Whitman, Walt

32.

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

33.

If I have not read a book before, it is, for all intents and purposes, new to me whether it was printed yesterday or three hundred years ago.

Hazlitt, William

34.

The mortality of all inanimate things is terrible to me, but that of books most of all.

Howells, William Dean

35.

Fiction reveals truth that reality obscures.

West, Jessamyn

36.

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.

37.

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.

38.

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.

39.

Books to judicious compilers, are useful; to particular arts and professions, they are absolutely necessary; to men of real science, they are tools: but more are tools to them.

Johnson

40.

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

41.

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

42.

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

43.

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

Lawrence, D. H.

44.

Most books, like their authors, are born to die; of only a few books can it be said that death has no dominion over them; they live, and their influence lives forever.

Swartz, J.

45.

A good title is the title of a successful book.

Chandler, Raymond

46.

The most foolish kind of a book is a kind of leaky boat on the sea of wisdom; some of the wisdom will get in anyhow.

Holmes, Oliver Wendell

47.

The more sins you confess, the more books you will sell.

Proverb, American

48.

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

49.

A library is thought in cold storage.

Samuel, Herbert

50.

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