Quotes about books-reading

There is no Frigate like a book to take us lands away nor any coursers like a page of prancing Poetry.

— Emily Dickinson

He ate and drank the precious Words, his Spirit grew robust; He knew no more that he was poor, nor that his frame was Dust.

— Emily Dickinson

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.

— Walt Disney

I always like to look on the optimistic side of life, but I am realistic enough to know that life is a complex matter.

— Walt Disney

Books are fatal: they are the curse of the human race. Nine-tenths of existing books are nonsense, and the clever books are the refutation of that nonsense. The greatest misfortune that ever befell man was the invention of printing.

— Benjamin Disraeli

Nine-tenths of the existing books are nonsense and the clever books are the refutation of that nonsense.

— Benjamin Disraeli

There is an art of reading, as well as an art of thinking, and an art of writing.

— Isaac Disraeli

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.

— Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

Never judge a book by its movie.

— J. W. Eagan

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.

— Terry Eagleton

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.

— Umberto Eco

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.

— Tryon Edwards

No story is the same to us after a lapse of time; or rather we who read it are no longer the same interpreters.

— George Eliot

If we encounter a man of rare intellect, we should ask him what books he reads.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

Never read any book that is not a year old.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

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

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

Books are the best of things if well used; if abused, among the worst. They are good for nothing but to inspire. I had better never see a book than be warped by its attraction clean out of my own orbit, and made a satellite instead of a system.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

Tis the good reader that makes the good book; in every book he finds passages which seem to be confidences or sides hidden from all else and unmistakably meant for his ear; the profit of books is according to the sensibility of the reader; the profound thought or passion sleeps as in a mine, until it is discovered by an equal mind and heart.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

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.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

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

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

There is creative reading as well as creative writing.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

When I get a little money, I buy books; and if any is left I buy food and clothes.

— Desiderius Erasmus

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.

— Clifton Fadiman

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

— William Faulkner

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.

— William Faulkner

If the riches of the Indies, or the crowns of all the kingdom of Europe, were laid at my feet in exchange for my love of reading, I would spurn them all.

— Francois FeNelon

We are as liable to be corrupted by books, as by companions.

— Henry Fielding

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.

— Henry Fielding

Read in order to live.

— Gustave Flaubert

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

— Edward M. Forster

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

— Edward M. Forster

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.

— Edward M. Forster

The books that everybody admires are those that nobody reads.

— Anatole France

Reading makes a full man, meditation a profound man, discourse a clear man.

— Benjamin Franklin

Read much, but not many books.

— Benjamin Franklin

No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader.

— Robert Frost

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.

— Carlos Fuentes

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

— Margaret Fuller

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.

— Margaret Fuller

A book that is shut is but a block.

— Thomas Fuller

Today a reader, tomorrow a leader.

— W. Fusselman

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.

— Harold S. Geneen

My early and invincible love of reading I would not exchange for all the riches of India.

— Edward Gibbon

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

— Edward Gibbon

I know every book of mine by its smell, and I have but to put my nose between the pages to be reminded of all sorts of things.

— George Robert Gissing

As writers become more numerous, it is natural for readers to become more indolent; whence must necessarily arise a desire of attaining knowledge with the greatest possible ease.

— Oliver Goldsmith

The first time I read an excellent work, it is to me just as if I gained a new friend; and when I read over a book I have perused before, it resembles the meeting of an old one.

— Sir James Goldsmith

I read part of it all the way through.

— Samuel Goldwyn

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.

— Jacquelyn Gross

The unread story is not a story; it is little black marks on wood pulp. The reader, reading it, makes it live: a live thing, a story.

— Ursula K. Le Guin

I have read your book and much like it.

— Moses Hadas

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

— Moses Hadas

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.

— Elizabeth Hardwick

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

— John Harington

In a real sense, people who have read good literature have lived more than people who cannot or will not read. It is not true that we have only one life to live; if we can read, we can live as many more lives and as many kinds of lives as we wish.

— S. I. Hayakawa

If I have not read a book before, it is, for all intents and purposes, new to me whether it was printed yesterday or three hundred years ago.

— William Hazlitt

The good parts of a book may be only something a writer is lucky enough to overhear or it may be the wreck of his whole damn life --and one is as good as the other.

— Ernest Hemingway

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.

— Ernest Hemingway

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

— Oliver Wendell Holmes

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.

— Oliver Wendell Holmes

The best of a book is not the thought which it contains, but the thought which it suggests; just as the charm of music dwells not in the tones but in the echoes of our hearts.

— Oliver Wendell Holmes

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.

— Paxton Hood

Be as careful of the books you read, as of the company you keep; for your habits and character will be as much influenced by the former as by the latter.

— Paxton Hood

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

— Thomas Hood

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

— Anthony Hope

Books in a large university library system: 2, 000,000. Books in an average large city library: 1 0,000. Average number of books in a chain bookstore: 30, 000. Books in an average neighborhood branch library: 20, 000.

— Lois Horowitz

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

— William Dean Howells

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

— Elbert Hubbard

To learn to read is to light a fire; every syllable that is spelled out is a spark.

— Victor Hugo

It is from books that wise people derive consolation in the troubles of life.

— Victor Hugo

It is books that teach us to refine our pleasures when young, and to recall them with satisfaction when we are old.

— Leigh Hunt

A bad book is as much of a labor to write as a good one; it comes as sincerely from the author's soul.

— Aldous Huxley

Books are the money of Literature, but only the counters of Science.

— Thomas H. Huxley

The newest books are those that never grow old.

— George Holbrook Jackson

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

— Holbrook Jackson

The only obligation to which in advance we may hold a novel, without incurring the accusation of being arbitrary, is that it be interesting.

— Henry James

I cannot live without books.

— Thomas Jefferson

Books constitute capital. A library book lasts as long as a house, for hundreds of years. It is not, then, an article of mere consumption but fairly of capital, and often in the case of professional men, setting out in life, it is their only capital.

— Thomas Jefferson

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

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

What is written without effort is in general read without pleasure.

— Samuel Johnson

Books that you carry to the fire, and hold readily in your hand, are most useful after all.

— Samuel Johnson

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

— Samuel Johnson

Books like friends, should be few and well-chosen.

— Joineriana

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

— Charles ''Tremendous'' Jones

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

— Joseph Joubert

The worst thing about new books is that they keep us from reading the old ones.

— Joseph Joubert

One man is as good as another until he has written a book.

— Benjamin Jowett

The Bible remained for me a book of books, still divine -- but divine in the sense that all great books are divine which teach men how to live righteously.

— Sir Arthur Keith

Everywhere I have sought rest and not found it, except sitting in a corner by myself with a little book.

— Thomas Kempis

To sit alone in the lamplight with a book spread out before you hold intimate converse with men of unseen generations -- such is pleasure beyond compare.

— Yoshida Kenko

I am a part of everything that I have read.

— John Kieran

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.

— Charles Kingsley

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.

— Charles Kingsley

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.

— E.N. Kirk

You can either read something many times in order to be assured that you got it all, or else you can define your purpose and use techniques which will assure that you have met it and gotten what you need.

— Peter Kump

He has left off reading altogether, to the great improvement of his originality.

— Charles Lamb

Borrowers of books --those mutilators of collections, spoilers of the symmetry of shelves, and creators of odd volumes.

— Charles Lamb

I love to lose myself in other men's minds. When I am not walking, I am reading. I cannot sit and think; books think for me.

— Charles Lamb

What is reading, but silent conversation.

— Walter Savage Landor