Motivational Quotes

Books - reading

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

Best Quotes about Books - reading

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

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

In science, read by preference the newest works. In literature, read the oldest. The classics are always modern.

Lytton, Lord Edward

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.

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

Pound, Ezra

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

Surviving and thriving as a professional today demands two new approaches to the written word. First, it requires a new approach to orchestrating information, by skillfully choosing what to read and what to ignore. Second, it requires a new approach to integrating information, by reading faster and with greater comprehension.

Calano, Jimmy

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

Barrett, E.S.

A person who publishes a book appears willfully in public with his pants down.

Millay, Edna St. Vincent

10.

Books, like friends, should be few and well chosen. Like friends, too, we should return to them again and again for, like true friends, they will never fail us -- never cease to instruct -- never cloy.

Colton, Charles Caleb

11.

The classics are only primitive literature. They belong to the same class as primitive machinery and primitive music and primitive medicine.

Leacock, Stephen B.

12.

Ideally a book would have no order to it, and the reader would have to discover his own.

Vaneigem, Raoul

13.

Books are not men and yet they stay alive.

Benet, Stephen Vincent

14.

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

Murray, William

15.

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

Descartes, Rene

16.

A novel is a mirror carried along a main road.

Stendhal, Henri B.

17.

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

Hood, Thomas

18.

All my good reading, you might say, was done in the toilet. There are passages in Ulysses which can be read only in the toilet -- if one wants to extract the full flavor of their content.

Miller, Henry

19.

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

Lee, Spike

20.

If I had my way books would not be written in English, but in an exceedingly difficult secret language that only skilled professional readers and story-tellers could interpret. Then people like you would have to go to public halls and pay good prices to hear the professionals decode and read the books aloud for you. This plan would have the advantage of scaring off all amateur authors, retired politicians, country doctors and I-Married-a-Midget writers who would not have the patience to learn the secret language.

Davies, Robertson

21.

All good books are alike in that they are truer than if they had really happened and after you are finished reading one you will feel that all that happened to you and afterwards it all belongs to you; the good and the bad, the ecstasy, the remorse, and sorrow, the people and the places and how the weather was.

Hemingway, Ernest

22.

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.

23.

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

Carey, Joyce

24.

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

Jackson, Holbrook

25.

Except a living man there is nothing more wonderful than a book! a message to us from the dead -- from human souls we never saw, who lived, perhaps, thousands of miles away. And yet these, in those little sheets of paper, speak to us, arouse us, terrify us, teach us, comfort us, open their hearts to us as brothers.

Kingsley, Charles

26.

The world of books is the most remarkable creation of man nothing else that he builds ever lasts monuments fall; nations perish; civilization grow old and die out; new races build others. But in the world of books are volumes that have seen this happen again and again and yet live on. Still young, still as fresh as the day they were written, still telling men's hearts, of the hearts of men centuries dead.

Day, Clarence

27.

Footnotes are the finer-suckered surfaces that allow testicular paragraphs to hold fast to the wider reality of the library.

Baker, Nicholson

28.

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

Whitman, Walt

29.

Without books the development of civilization would have been impossible. They are the engines of change, windows on the world, Lighthouses as the poet said erected in the sea of time. They are companions, teachers, magicians, bankers of the treasures of the mind, Books are humanity in print.

Schopenhauer, Arthur

30.

Old books, you know well, are books of the world's youth, and new books are the fruits of its age.

Holmes, Oliver Wendell

31.

Early in the morning, at break of day, in all the freshness and dawn of one's strength, to read a book --I call that vicious!

Nietzsche, Friedrich

32.

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

Schopenhauer, Arthur

33.

The books we read should be chosen with great care, that they may be, as an Egyptian king wrote over his library, The medicines of the soul.

Hood, Paxton

34.

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

Hadas, Moses

35.

I used to walk to school with my nose buried in a book.

Coolio

36.

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

Mencken, H. L.

37.

This book is not to be tossed lightly aside, but to be hurled with great force.

Parker, Dorothy

38.

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

Channing, William Ellery

39.

No entertainment is so cheap as reading, nor is any pleasure so lasting.

Montagu, Lady Mary Wortley

40.

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

41.

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

42.

A book that is shut is but a block.

Fuller, Thomas

43.

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

Schopenhauer, Arthur

44.

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.

45.

Learning to read has been reduced to a process of mastering a series of narrow, specific, hierarchical skills. Where armed-forces recruits learn the components of a rifle or the intricacies of close order drill by the numbers, recruits to reading learn its mechanics sound by sound and word by word.

Gross, Jacquelyn

46.

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

47.

A wicked book cannot repent.

Proverb

48.

Some books leave us free and some books make us free.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

49.

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

Marcel, Anthony

50.

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