Motivational Quotes

Books - reading

To read too many books is harmful.

- Zedong, Mao

Best Quotes about Books - reading

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

Mencken, H. L.

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

Next to acquiring good friends, the best acquisition is that of good books.

Colton, Charles Caleb

Books are not men and yet they stay alive.

Benet, Stephen Vincent

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

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

Lytton, Lord Edward

I am what libraries and librarians have made me, with little assistance from a professor of Greek and poets.

Sandwell, B. K.

The chief knowledge that a man gets from reading books is the knowledge that very few of them are worth reading.

Mencken, H. L.

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

Lee, Spike

10.

I don't think any good book is based on factual experience. Bad books are about things the writer already knew before he wrote them.

Fuentes, Carlos

11.

Books are the bees which carry the quickening pollen from one to another mind.

Lowell, James Russell

12.

One half who graduate from college never read another book.

True, Herbert

13.

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

Harington, John

14.

To read too many books is harmful.

Zedong, Mao

15.

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

Chamfort, Sebastien-Roch Nicolas De

16.

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.

17.

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

18.

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.

19.

Some of the most famous books are the least worth reading. Their fame was due to their having done something that needed to be doing in their day. The work is done and the virtue of the book has expired.

Morely, John

20.

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

Belloc, Hilaire

21.

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

22.

He has only half learned the art of reading who has not added to it the more refined art of skipping and skimming.

Balfour, Arthur James

23.

A real book is not one that we read, but one that reads us.

Auden, W. H.

24.

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

25.

A book might be written on the injustice of the just.

Hope, Anthony

26.

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

Chappell, Warren

27.

Books are those faithful mirrors that reflect to our mind the minds of sages and heroes.

Gibbon, Edward

28.

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

29.

It does not follow because many books are written by persons born in America that there exists an American literature. Books which imitate or represent the thoughts and life of Europe do not constitute an American literature. Before such can exist, an original idea must animate this nation and fresh currents of life must call into life fresh thoughts along the shore.

Fuller, Margaret

30.

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

Pascal, Blaise

31.

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

32.

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

Hubbard, Elbert

33.

Books are but waste paper unless we spend in action the wisdom we get from thought -- asleep. When we are weary of the living, we may repair to the dead, who have nothing of peevishness, pride, or design in their conversation.

Collier, Jeremy

34.

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

35.

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

Howells, William Dean

36.

We are too civil to books. For a few golden sentences we will turn over and actually read a volume of four or five hundred pages.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

37.

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

Twain, Mark

38.

A book that is shut is but a block.

Fuller, Thomas

39.

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

40.

The constant habit of perusing devout books is so indispensable, that it has been termed the oil of the lamp of prayer. Too much reading, however, and too little meditation, may produce the effect of a lamp inverted; which is extinguished by the very excess of that ailment, whose property is to feed it.

More, Hannah

41.

Books are not absolutely dead things, but do contain a certain potency of life in them, to be as active as the soul whose progeny they are; they preserve, as in a vial, the purest efficacy and extraction of the living intellect that bred them.

Milton, John

42.

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

Channing, William Ellery

43.

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

Carlyle, Thomas

44.

I would sooner read a timetable or a catalog than nothing at all.

Maugham, W. Somerset

45.

Everything in the world exists to end up in a book.

Mallarme, Stephane

46.

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

47.

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

48.

Beware of the person of one book.

Aquinas, St. Thomas

49.

All the known world, excepting only savage nations, is governed by books.

Voltaire

50.

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

Millay, Edna St. Vincent