Motivational Quotes

Books - reading

Book love... is your pass to the greatest, the purest, and the most perfect pleasure that God has prepared for His creatures.

- Trollope, Anthony

Best Quotes about Books - reading

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.

Read good, big important things.

Noonan, Peggy

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

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

Secondat, Charles de

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

You should read books like you take medicine, by advice, and not by advertisement.

Ruskin, John

Everywhere I have sought rest and not found it, except sitting in a corner by myself with a little book.

Kempis, Thomas

Books, books, books had found the secret of a garret-room piled high with cases in my father's name; Piled high, packed large, --where, creeping in and out among the giant fossils of my past, like some small nimble mouse between the ribs of a mastodon, I nibbled here and there at this or that box, pulling through the gap, in heats of terror, haste, victorious joy, the first book first. And how I felt it beat under my pillow, in the morning's dark. An hour before the sun would let me read! My books!

Browning, Elizabeth Barrett

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

10.

The books we think we ought to read are poky, dull, and dry; The books that we would like to read we are ashamed to buy; The books that people talk about we never can recall; And the books that people give us, oh, they're the worst of all.

Wells, Carolyn

11.

In the dark colony of night, when I consider man's magnificent capacity for malice, madness, folly, envy, rage, and destructiveness, and I wonder whether we shall not end up as breakfast for newts and polyps, I seem to hear the muffled cries of all the words in all the books with covers closed.

Rosten, Leo

12.

If a book comes from the heart it will contrive to reach other hearts. All art and author craft are of small account to that.

Carlyle, Thomas

13.

Most books today seemed to have been written overnight from books read the day before.

Chamfort, Sebastien-Roch Nicolas De

14.

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

Ruskin, John

15.

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

16.

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

17.

A vacuum of ideas affects people differently than a vacuum of air, otherwise readers of books would be constantly collapsing.

Lichtenberg, Georg C.

18.

I read the newspaper avidly. It is my one form of continuous fiction.

Bevan, Aneurin

19.

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

20.

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

21.

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

Lee, Harper

22.

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

23.

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

24.

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

Lee, Spike

25.

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

Brown, Les

26.

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

27.

Books had instant replay long before televised sports.

Williams, Bert

28.

The unread story is not a story; it is little black marks on wood pulp. The reader, reading it, makes it live: a live thing, a story.

Guin, Ursula K. Le

29.

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

30.

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.

31.

There was a time when the world acted on books; now books act on the world.

Joubert, Joseph

32.

A good title is the title of a successful book.

Chandler, Raymond

33.

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.

34.

Book love... is your pass to the greatest, the purest, and the most perfect pleasure that God has prepared for His creatures.

Trollope, Anthony

35.

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

Howells, William Dean

36.

Once we have learned to read, meaning of words can somehow register without consciousness.

Marcel, Anthony

37.

There is creative reading as well as creative writing.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

38.

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

Maclennan, Hugh

39.

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

40.

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

Schopenhauer, Arthur

41.

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

Hubbard, Elbert

42.

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

Asimov, Isaac

43.

There are two kinds of books. Those that no one reads and those that no one ought to read.

Mencken, H. L.

44.

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

45.

Hypocrite reader -- my fellow -- my brother!

Baudelaire, Charles

46.

Books are lighthouses erected in the great sea of time.

Whipple, Edwin P.

47.

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

Phillips, Wendell

48.

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

49.

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

50.

The multitude of books is a great evil. There is no limit to this fever for writing.

Luther, Martin