Motivational Quotes

Books - reading

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

Best Quotes about Books - reading

Read as you taste fruit or savor wine, or enjoy friendship, love or life.

Jackson, Holbrook

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

A library is thought in cold storage.

Samuel, Herbert

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

Chamfort, Sebastien-Roch Nicolas De

Tradition is but a meteor, which, if it once falls, cannot be rekindled. Memory, once interrupted, is not to be recalled. But written learning is a fixed luminary, which, after the cloud that had hidden it has passed away, is again bright in its proper station. So books are faithful repositories, which may be awhile neglected or forgotten, but when opened again, will again impart instruction.

Johnson

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

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

Brookner, Anita

Readers are plentiful: thinkers are rare.

Martineau, Harriet

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

Bulwer-Lytton, Edward G.

10.

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

Bach, Richard

11.

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

12.

He that loves a book will never want a faithful friend, a wholesome counselor, a cheerful companion, an effectual comforter. By study, by reading, by thinking, one may innocently divert and pleasantly entertain himself, as in all weathers, as in all fortunes.

Barrow

13.

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

Faulkner, William

14.

The best effect of any book, is that it excites the reader to self-activity.

Carlyle, Thomas

15.

People are much more willing to lend you books than bookcases.

Twain, Mark

16.

Miss a meal if you have to, but don't miss a book.

Rohn, Jim

17.

The newest books are those that never grow old.

Jackson, George Holbrook

18.

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

Asimov, Isaac

19.

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

Howells, William Dean

20.

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

21.

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

Chappell, Warren

22.

After all, the world is not a stage -- not to me: nor a theatre: nor a show-house of any sort. And art, especially novels, are not little theatres where the reader sits aloft and watches... and sighs, commiserates, condones and smiles. That's what you want a book to be: because it leaves you so safe and superior, with your two-dollar ticket to the show. And that's what my books are not and never will be. Whoever reads me will be in the thick of the scrimmage, and if he doesn't like it -- if he wants a safe seat in the audience -- let him read someone else.

Lawrence, D. H.

23.

We should be as careful of the books we read, as of the company we keep. The dead very often have more power than the living.

Edwards, Tryon

24.

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

Murray, William

25.

There are worse crimes than burning books. One of them is not reading them.

Brodsky, Joseph

26.

Read Homer once, and you can read no more. For all books else appear so mean, and so poor. Verse will seem prose; but still persist to read, and Homer will be all the books you need.

Buckingham, Duke of

27.

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

28.

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

29.

The oldest books are still only just out to those who have not read them.

Butler, Samuel

30.

Today a reader, tomorrow a leader.

Fusselman, W.

31.

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

Hadas, Moses

32.

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

33.

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

34.

There are people who read too much: bibliobibuli. I know some who are constantly drunk on books, as other men are drunk on whiskey or religion. They wander through this most diverting and stimulating of worlds in a haze, seeing nothing and hearing nothing.

Mencken, H. L.

35.

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.

36.

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

Marcel, Anthony

37.

No matter how busy you may think you are, you must find time for reading, or surrender yourself to self-chosen ignorance.

Townsend, Atwood H.

38.

Books are the blessed chloroform of the mind.

Chambers, Robert

39.

Read, read, read. Read everything-- trash, classics, good and bad, and see how they do it. Just like a carpenter who works as an apprentice and studies the master. Read! You'll absorb it. Then write. If it is good, you'll find out. If it's not, throw it out the window.

Faulkner, William

40.

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

Lee, Spike

41.

The mere brute pleasure of reading --the sort of pleasure a cow must have in grazing.

Chesterton, Gilbert K.

42.

To buy books would be a good thing if we also could buy the time to read them.

Schopenhauer, Arthur

43.

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

Joubert, Joseph

44.

The worst readers are those who behave like plundering troops: they take away a few things they can use, dirty and confound the remainder, and revile the whole.

Nietzsche, Friedrich

45.

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

46.

Only a generation of readers will span a generation of writers.

Spielberg, Steven

47.

You will be the same person in five as you are today except for the people you meet and the books you read.

Jones, Charles ''Tremendous''

48.

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

49.

The last thing one discovers in composing a work is what to put first.

Pascal, Blaise

50.

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.