Motivational Quotes

Books - reading

The world may be full of fourth-rate writers but it's also full of fourth-rate readers.

- Barstow, Stan

Best Quotes about Books - reading

The world may be full of fourth-rate writers but it's also full of fourth-rate readers.

Barstow, Stan

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

Asimov, Isaac

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.

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

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

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

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

Carey, Joyce

When you reread a classic, you do not see more in the book than you did before; you see more in you than there was before.

Fadiman, Clifton

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.

10.

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

11.

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

12.

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

13.

I suggest that the only books that influence us are those for which we are ready, and which have gone a little further down our particular path than we have yet got ourselves.

Forster, Edward M.

14.

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

15.

A novel is a mirror carried along a main road.

Stendhal, Henri B.

16.

Beware of the person of one book.

Aquinas, St. Thomas

17.

When I am dead, I hope it may be said: His sins were scarlet, but his books were read.

Belloc, Hilaire

18.

There is more treasure in books than in all the pirates loot on Treasure Island and best of all, you can enjoy these riches every day of your life.

Disney, Walt

19.

No man understands a deep book until he has seen and lived at least part of its contents.

Pound, Ezra

20.

I heard his library burned down and both books were destroyed -- and one of them hadn't even been colored in yet.

Dawkins, John

21.

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

22.

No furniture is so charming as books.

Smith, Sydney

23.

The printing press is either the greatest blessing or the greatest curse of modern times, sometimes one forgets which it is.

Barrie, Sir James M.

24.

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

25.

From the moment I picked your book up until I laid it down I was convulsed with laughter. Some day I intend reading it.

Marx, Groucho

26.

Americans will listen, but they do not care to read. War and Peace must wait for the leisure of retirement, which never really comes: meanwhile it helps to furnish the living room. Blockbusting fiction is bought as furniture. Unread, it maintains its value. Read, it looks like money wasted. Cunningly, Americans know that books contain a person, and they want the person, not the book.

Burgess, Anthony

27.

A good title is the title of a successful book.

Chandler, Raymond

28.

A book may be compared to your neighbor: if it be good, it cannot last too long; if bad, you cannot get rid of it too early.

Brooke, Rupert

29.

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

Murray, William

30.

A house is not a home unless it contains food and fire for the mind as well as the body.

Fuller, Margaret

31.

A good book, in the language of the book-sellers, is a salable one; in that of the curious, a scarce one; in that of men of sense, a useful and instructive one.

Chambers, Oswald

32.

Somewhere, everywhere, now hidden, now apparent in what ever is written down, is the form of a human being. If we seek to know him, are we idly occupied?

Woolf, Virginia

33.

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

34.

Books are lighthouses erected in the great sea of time.

Whipple, Edwin P.

35.

Books had instant replay long before televised sports.

Williams, Bert

36.

A library is thought in cold storage.

Samuel, Herbert

37.

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

Pound, Ezra

38.

A bad book is the worse that it cannot repent. It has not been the devil's policy to keep the masses of mankind in ignorance; but finding that they will read, he is doing all in his power to poison their books.

Kirk, E.N.

39.

The novel can't compete with cars, the movies, television, and liquor. A guy who's had a good feed and tanked up on good wine gives his old lady a kiss after supper and his day is over. Finished.

Celine, Louis-Ferdinand

40.

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

Lee, Spike

41.

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

42.

Everything you need for better future and success has already been written. And guess what? All you have to do is go to the library.

Rohn, Jim

43.

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

Barrett, E.S.

44.

The good of a book lies in its being read. A book is made up of signs that speak of other signs, which in their turn speak of things. Without an eye to read them, a book contains signs that produce no concepts; therefore it is dumb.

Eco, Umberto

45.

The books that everybody admires are those that nobody reads.

France, Anatole

46.

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

47.

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

Bevan, Aneurin

48.

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

Forster, Edward M.

49.

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.

50.

Don't just read the easy stuff. You may be entertained by it, but you will never grow from it.

Rohn, Jim