Books Quotations
Authors that have more than 2 quotes:
Henry Ward Beecher,
Ralph Waldo Emerson,
Holbrook Jackson,
Groucho Marx,
Henry David Thoreau
|
|
|
| That is a good book which is opened with expectation and closed with profit. |
| - Amos Bronson Alcott |
|
|
|
|
| A dirty book is rarely dusty. |
| - Unknown Author |
|
| A good book on your shelf is a friend that turns its back on you and remains a friend. |
| - Unknown Author |
|
| Anyone who says they have only one life to live must not know how to read a book. |
| - Unknown Author |
|
| If you resist reading what you disagree with, how will you ever acquire deeper insights into what you believe? The things most worth reading are precisely those that challenge our convictions. |
| - Unknown Author |
|
| TV. If kids are entertained by two letters, imagine the fun they'll have with twenty-six. Open your child's imagination. Open a book. |
| - Unknown Author |
|
|
|
|
| For friends... do but look upon good Books: they are true friends, that will neither flatter nor dissemble. |
| - Francis Bacon |
|
| Some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested. |
| - Francis Bacon |
|
|
|
|
| Americans like fat books and thin women. |
| - Russell Baker |
|
|
|
|
| A book is a garden, an orchard, a storehouse, a party, a company by the way, a counsellor, a multitude of counsellors. |
| - Henry Ward Beecher |
|
| Books are not made for furniture, but there is nothing else that so beautifully furnishes a house. |
| - Henry Ward Beecher |
|
| There is a temperate zone in the mind, between luxurious indolence and exacting work; and it is to this region, just between laziness and labor, that summer reading belongs. |
| - Henry Ward Beecher |
|
|
|
|
| An ordinary man can... surround himself with two thousand books... and thenceforward have at least one place in the world in which it is possible to be happy. |
| - Augustine Birrell |
|
| Good as it is to inherit a library, it is better to collect one. |
| - Augustine Birrell |
|
|
|
|
| No man can be called friendless who has God and the companionship of good books. |
| - Elizabeth Barrett Browning |
|
|
|
|
| To read without reflecting is like eating without digesting. |
| - Edmund Burke |
|
|
|
|
| The oldest books are still only just out to those who have not read them. |
| - Samuel Butler |
|
|
|
|
| In books lies the soul of the whole Past Time: the articulate audible voice of the Past, when the body and material substance of it has altogether vanished like a dream. |
| - Thomas Carlyle |
|
|
|
|
| Having your book turned into a movie is like seeing your oxen turned into bouillon cubes. |
| - John le Carré |
|
|
|
|
| I knew a gentleman who was so good a manager of his time that he would not even lose that small portion of it which the calls of nature obliged him to pass in the necessary-house; but gradually went through all the Latin poets in those moments. |
| - Lord Chesterfield |
|
|
|
|
| There is a great deal of difference between an eager man who wants to read a book and a tired man who wants a book to read. |
| - Gilbert Keith Chesterton |
|
|
|
|
| A man may as well expect to grow stronger by always eating as wiser by always reading. |
| - Jeremy Collier |
|
| Books support us in our solitude and keep us from being a burden to ourselves. |
| - Jeremy Collier |
|
|
|
|
| Tis the good reader that makes the good book; in every book he finds passages which seem confidences or asides hidden from all else and unmistakenly meant for his ear; the profit of books is according to the sensibility of the reader; the profoundest 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 |
|
| The years teach much which the days never knew. |
| - Ralph Waldo Emerson |
|
|
|
|
| When you reread a classic you do not see more in the book than you did before; you see more in you than was there before. |
| - Clifton Fadiman |
|
|
|
|
| There is a wonder in reading Braille that the sighted will never know: to touch words and have them touch you back. |
| - Jim Fiebig |
|
|
|
|
| Books have to be read (worse luck it takes so long a time). It is the only way of discovering what they contain. A few savage tribes eat them, but reading is the only method of assimilation revealed to the West. |
| - E.M. Forster |
|
| I suggest that 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. |
| - E.M. Forster |
|
|
|
|
| Never lend books, for no one ever returns them; the only books I have in my library are books that other folks have lent me. |
| - Anatole France |
|
|
|
|
| A book that is shut is but a block. |
| - Thomas Fuller |
|
|
|
|
| Books are delightful society. If you go into a room and find it full of books - even without taking them from the shelves they seem to speak to you, to bid you welcome. |
| - William Ewart Gladstone |
|
|
|
|
| Books let us into their souls and lay open to us the secrets of our own. |
| - William Hazlitt |
|
|
|
|
| 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, Sr. Holmes |
|
|
|
|
| This will never be a civilized country until we expend more money for books than we do for chewing gum. |
| - Elbert Hubbard |
|
|
|
|
| The scholar only knows how dear these silent, yet eloquent, companions of pure thoughts and innocent hours become in the season of adversity. When all that is worldly turns to dross around us, these only retain their steady value. |
| - Washington Irving |
|
|
|
|
| A good book is always on tap; it may be decanted and drunk a hundred times, and it is still there for further imbibement. |
| - Holbrook Jackson |
|
| The time to read is any time: no apparatus, no appointment of time and place, is necessary. It is the only art which can be practised at any hour of the day or night, whenever the time and inclination comes, that is your time for reading; in joy or sorrow, health or illness. |
| - Holbrook Jackson |
|
| A large, still book is a piece of quietness, succulent and nourishing in a noisy world, which I approach and imbibe with "a sort of greedy enjoyment," as Marcel Proust said of those rooms of his old home whose air was "saturated with the bouquet of silence." |
| - Holbrook Jackson |
|
|
|
|
| As a rule reading fiction is as hard to me as trying to hit a target by hurling feathers at it. I need resistance to celebrate! |
| - William James |
|
|
|
|
| A blessed companion is a book, - a book that, fitly chosen, is a lifelong friend,... a book that, at a touch, pours its heart into our own. |
| - Douglas Jerrold |
|
|
|
|
| A book must be an ice-axe to break the seas frozen inside our soul. |
| - Franz Kafka |
|
|
|
|
| Except a living man there is nothing more wonderful than a book! A message to us from the dead, - from human souls whom we never saw, who lived perhaps thousands of miles away; and yet these, on those little sheets of paper, speak to us, teach us, comfort us, open their hearts to us as brothers. |
| - Charles Kingsley |
|
|
|
|
| A book reads the better which is our own, and has been so long known to us, that we know the topography of its blots, and dog's ears, and can trace the dirt in it to having read it at tea with buttered muffins. |
| - Charles Lamb |
|
| I love to lose myself in other men's minds.... Books think for me. |
| - Charles Lamb |
|
|
|
|
| Reading means borrowing. |
| - Georg Christoph Lichtenberg |
|
|
|
|
| Books serve to show a man that those original thoughts of his aren't very new after all. |
| - Abraham Lincoln |
|
|
|
|
| Books are the bees which carry the quickening pollen from one to another mind. |
| - James Russell Lowell |
|
|
|
|
| Far more seemly were it for thee to have thy study full of books, than thy purse full of money. |
| - John Lyly |
|
|
|
|
| The book of the moment often has immense vogue, while the book of the age, which comes in its company from the press, lies unnoticed; but the great book has its revenge. It lives to see its contemporary pushed up shelf by shelf until it finds its final resting-place in the garret or the auction room. |
| - Hamilton Wright Mabie |
|
|
|
|
| Many persons read and like fiction. It does not tax the intelligence and the intelligence of most of us can so ill afford taxation that we rightly welcome any reading matter which avoids this. |
| - Rose Macaulay |
|
|
|
|
| He fed his spirit with the bread of books. |
| - Edwin Markham |
|
|
|
|
| Outside of a dog, a book is man's best friend. Inside of a dog it's too dark to read. |
| - Groucho Marx |
|
| Outside of a dog, a book is probably man's best friend; and inside of a dog, it's too dark to read. |
| - Groucho Marx |
|
| I find television to be very educating. Every time somebody turns on the set, I go in the other room and read a book. |
| - Groucho Marx |
|
|
|
|
| To acquire the habit of reading is to construct for yourself a refuge from almost all the miseries of life. |
| - William Somerset Maugham |
|
|
|
|
| The art of reading is in great part that of acquiring a better understanding of life from one's encounter with it in a book. |
| - André Maurois |
|
|
|
|
| We should read to give our souls a chance to luxuriate. |
| - Henry Miller |
|
|
|
|
| No entertainment is so cheap as reading, nor any pleasure so lasting. |
| - Mary Wortley Montagu |
|
|
|
|
| Lord! when you sell a man a book you don't sell just twelve ounces of paper and ink and glue - you sell him a whole new life. Love and friendship and humour and ships at sea by night - there's all heaven and earth in a book, a real book. |
| - Christopher Morley |
|
|
|
|
| If there's a book you really want to read, but it hasn't been written yet, then you must write it. |
| - Toni Morrison |
|
|
|
|
| Always read something that will make you look good if you die in the middle of it. |
| - P.J. O'Rourke |
|
|
|
|
| I have friends whose society is delightful to me; they are persons of all countries and of all ages; distinguished in war, in council, and in letters; easy to live with, always at my command. |
| - Francesco Petrarch |
|
|
|
|
| I divide all readers into two classes; those who read to remember and those who read to forget. |
| - William Lyon Phelps |
|
|
|
|
| Books are immortal sons deifying their sires. |
| - Plato |
|
|
|
|
| He who lends a book is an idiot. He who returns the book is more of an idiot. |
| - Arab Proverb |
|
|
|
|
| A book is like a garden carried in the pocket. |
| - Chinese Proverb |
|
| To read a book for the first time is to make an acquaintance with a new friend; to read it for a second time is to meet an old one. |
| - Chinese Proverb |
|
|
|
|
| I would be most content if my children grew up to be the kind of people who think decorating consists mostly of building enough bookshelves. |
| - Anna Quindlen |
|
|
|
|
| Bread of flour is good; but there is bread, sweet as honey, if we would eat it, in a good book. |
| - John Ruskin |
|
|
|
|
| Children don't read to find their identity, to free themselves from guilt, to quench the thirst for rebellion or to get rid of alienation. They have no use for psychology.... They still believe in God, the family, angels, devils, witches, goblins, logic, clarity, punctuation, and other such obsolete stuff.... When a book is boring, they yawn openly. They don't expect their writer to redeem humanity, but leave to adults such childish illusions. |
| - Isaac Bashevis Singer |
|
|
|
|
| People say that life is the thing, but I prefer reading. |
| - Logan Pearsall Smith |
|
| This nice and subtle happiness of reading, this joy not chilled by age, this polite and unpunished vice, this selfish, serene life-long intoxication. |
| - Logan Pearsall Smith |
|
|
|
|
| Reading is to the mind what exercise is to the body. |
| - Richard Steele |
|
|
|
|
| I often derive a peculiar satisfaction in conversing with the ancient and modern dead, - who yet live and speak excellently in their works. My neighbors think me often alone, - and yet at such times I am in company with more than five hundred mutes - each of whom, at my pleasure, communicates his ideas to me by dumb signs - quite as intelligently as any person living can do by uttering of words. |
| - Laurence Sterne |
|
|
|
|
| A good book should leave you... slightly exhausted at the end. You live several lives while reading it. |
| - William Styron |
|
| Reading - the best state yet to keep absolute loneliness at bay. |
| - William Styron |
|
|
|
|
| You know you've read a good book when you turn the last page and feel a little as if you have lost a friend. |
| - Paul Sweeney |
|
|
|
|
| A truly good book teaches me better than to read it. I must soon lay it down, and commence living on its hint.... What I began by reading, I must finish by acting. |
| - Henry David Thoreau |
|
| Books, not which afford us a cowering enjoyment, but in which each thought is of unusual daring; such as an idle man cannot read, and a timid one would not be entertained by, which even make us dangerous to existing institution - such call I good books. |
| - Henry David Thoreau |
|
| How many a man has dated a new era in his life from the reading of a book. |
| - Henry David Thoreau |
|
|
|
|
| Good friends, good books and a sleepy conscience: this is the ideal life. |
| - Mark Twain |
|
| The man who does not read good books has no advantage over the man who can't read them. |
| - Mark Twain |
|
|
|
|
| The multitude of books is making us ignorant. |
| - Voltaire |
|
|
|
|
| Nothing is worth reading that does not require an alert mind. |
| - Charles Dudley Warner |
|
|
|
|
| Fiction reveals truths that reality obscures. |
| - Jessamyn West |
|
|
|
|
| It is what you read when you don't have to that determines what you will be when you can't help it. |
| - Oscar Wilde |
|
| There is no such thing as a moral or immoral book; books are well written or badly written. |
| - Oscar Wilde |
|
|
|
|
| Books had instant replay long before televised sports. |
| - Bern Williams |
|
|
|
|
| I would never read a book if it were possible for me to talk half an hour with the man who wrote it. |
| - Woodrow Wilson |
|
|
|
|
| The wise man reads both books and life itself. |
| - Lin Yutang |
|
