Motivational Quotes

Books - reading

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

Best Quotes about Books - reading

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

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

Five daily newspapers arrive in my California driveway. The New York times and the Wall Street Journal are supplemented by three local papers. As for magazines, I read, or at least skim, Business Week, Forbes, The Economist, INC; Industry Week, Fortune. Other subscriptions include Sales and Marketing Management, Modern Health Care, Progressive Grocer, High Tech Business, and Slaon Management Review from MIT. I religiously read Business Tokyo, Asia Week, and Far Eastern Economic Review. I glance at Newsweek and Time ... but I devour the New Republic, Policy Review, Foreign Affairs, The Washington Monthly, and Public Interest. How about books? A dozen or more each month.

Peters, Thomas J.

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

Old books that have ceased to be of service should no more be abandoned than should old friends who have ceased to give pleasure.

Worsthorne, Sir Peregrine

Books and marriage go ill together.

Moliere

In the case of good books, the point is not how many of them you can get through, but rather how many can get through to you.

Adler, Mortimer J.

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

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

Phelps, William Lyon

10.

Read good, big important things.

Noonan, Peggy

11.

A book worth reading is worth buying.

Ruskin, John

12.

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

Hadas, Moses

13.

Who ever converses among old books will be hard to please among the new.

Temple, Sir William

14.

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

15.

Fiction reveals truth that reality obscures.

West, Jessamyn

16.

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

Carey, Joyce

17.

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

Harington, John

18.

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

Chappell, Warren

19.

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

Ruskin, John

20.

A multitude of books distracts the mind.

Socrates

21.

The age of the book is almost gone.

Steiner, George

22.

A person of mature years and ripe development, who is expecting nothing from literature but the corroboration and renewal of past ideas, may find satisfaction in a lucidity so complete as to occasion no imaginative excitement, but young and ambitious students are not content with it. They seek the excitement because they are capable of the growth that it accompanies.

Cooley, Charles Horton

23.

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

24.

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

25.

To read well, that is, to read true books in a true spirit, is a noble exercise, and one that will task the reader more than any other exercise which the customs of the day esteem. It requires a training such as the athletes underwent, the steady intention almost of the whole life to this object.

Thoreau, Henry David

26.

A book is a mirror: If an ass peers into it, you can't expect an apostle to look out.

Lichtenberg, Georg C.

27.

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

Twain, Mark

28.

The books that the world calls immoral are the books that show the world its own shame.

Wilde, Oscar

29.

A book that is shut is but a block.

Fuller, Thomas

30.

A book is a part of life, a manifestation of life, just as much as a tree or a horse or a star. It obeys its own rhythms, its own laws, whether it be a novel, a play, or a diary. The deep, hidden rhythm of life is always there -- that of the pulse, the heart beat.

Miller, Henry

31.

The man who does not read books has no advantage over the man that can not read them.

Twain, Mark

32.

I am a part of everything that I have read.

Kieran, John

33.

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

34.

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

35.

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

Phillips, Wendell

36.

A successful book cannot afford to be more than ten percent new.

Mcluhan, Marshall

37.

How can you dare teach a man to read until you've taught him everything else first?

Shaw, George Bernard

38.

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

Ruskin, John

39.

A man ought to read just as his inclination leads him; for what he reads as a task will do him little good.

Johnson, Samuel

40.

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

41.

My books are water; those of the great geniuses are wine -- everybody drinks water.

Twain, Mark

42.

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

Locke, John

43.

A novel is a mirror carried along a main road.

Stendhal, Henri B.

44.

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

Brookner, Anita

45.

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.

46.

The power of a text is different when it is read from when it is copied out. Only the copied text thus commands the soul of him who is occupied with it, whereas the mere reader never discovers the new aspects of his inner self that are opened by the text, that road cut through the interior jungle forever closing behind it: because the reader follows the movement of his mind in the free flight of day-dreaming, whereas the copier submits it to command.

Benjamin, Walter

47.

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

48.

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

Brown, Les

49.

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

50.

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

Dawkins, John