Motivational Quotes

Books - reading

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

Best Quotes about Books - reading

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

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

Dane, Frank

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

Adler, Mortimer J.

Read good, big important things.

Noonan, Peggy

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

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

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

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

I am a part of everything that I have read.

Kieran, John

10.

The reason that fiction is more interesting than any other form of literature, to those who really like to study people, is that in fiction the author can really tell the truth without humiliating himself.

Roosevelt, Eleanor

11.

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

Gibbon, Edward

12.

Every man is a volume if you know how to read him.

Channing, William Ellery

13.

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

Johnson, Samuel

14.

I've never know any trouble than an hour's reading didn't assuage.

Secondat, Charles de

15.

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

16.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

17.

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

Locke, John

18.

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

19.

An empty book is like an infant's soul, in which anything may be written. It is capable of all things, but containeth nothing. I have a mind to fill this with profitable wonders.

Traherne, Thomas

20.

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

Hunt, Leigh

21.

You've really got to start hitting the books because it's no joke out here.

Lee, Spike

22.

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

23.

A bad book is as much of a labor to write as a good one; it comes as sincerely from the author's soul.

Huxley, Aldous

24.

You will, I am sure, agree with me that... if page 534 only finds us in the second chapter, the length of the first one must have been really intolerable.

Doyle, Sir Arthur Conan

25.

Books are men of higher stature; the only men that speak aloud for future times to hear.

Barrett, E.S.

26.

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

Forster, Edward M.

27.

Do we write books so that they shall merely be read? Don't we also write them for employment in the household? For one that is read from start to finish, thousands are leafed through, other thousands lie motionless, others are jammed against mouseholes, thrown at rats, others are stood on, sat on, drummed on, have gingerbread baked on them or are used to light pipes.

Lichtenberg, Georg C.

28.

What is reading, but silent conversation.

Landor, Walter Savage

29.

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

Harington, John

30.

A wicked book cannot repent.

Proverb

31.

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.

32.

To sit alone in the lamplight with a book spread out before you hold intimate converse with men of unseen generations -- such is pleasure beyond compare.

Kenko, Yoshida

33.

A real book is not one that we read, but one that reads us.

Auden, W. H.

34.

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

Mencken, H. L.

35.

Next, in importance to books are their titles.

Davies, Paul

36.

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

37.

I divide all readers into two classes: those who read to remember and those who read to forget.

Phelps, William Lyon

38.

Books are the blessed chloroform of the mind.

Chambers, Robert

39.

We are too civil to books. For a few golden sentences we will turn over and actually read a volume of four or five hundred pages.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

40.

Who kills a man kills a reasonable creature, God's image, but thee who destroys a good book, kills reason itself.

Milton, John

41.

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

42.

The newest books are those that never grow old.

Jackson, George Holbrook

43.

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

44.

Everything in this book may be wrong. [The Savior's Manual]

Bach, Richard

45.

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

Byron, Lord

46.

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

47.

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

Lee, Harper

48.

A novel is a mirror carried along a main road.

Stendhal, Henri B.

49.

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.

50.

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