Book Quotes About Reading & Ideas | GloryQuotes

Famous Book Quotes

Each age, it is found, must write its own books; or rather, each generation for the next succeeding.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Promiscuity is like never reading past the first page. Monogamy is like reading the same book over and over.

If a man writes a book, let him set down only what he knows. I have guesses enough of my own.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

I know many books which have bored their readers, but I know of none which has done real evil.

The man who does not read good books has no advantage over the man who cannot read them.

The greatest part of a writer's time is spent in reading in order to write. A man will turn over half a library to make a book.

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

Good friends, good books and a sleepy conscience: this is the ideal life.

Inspirational Book Quotes

The difference between literature and journalism is that journalism is unreadable and literature is not read.

Books can only reveal us to ourselves, and as often as they do us this service we lay them aside.

Henry David Thoreau

O Day of days when we can read! The reader and the book, either without the other is naught.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

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

There is a great deal of difference between an eager man who wants to read a book and the tired man who wants a book to read.

Gilbert K. Chesterton

A scholar is like a book written in a dead language. It is not every one that can read in it.

William Hazlitt

There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written, or badly written.

Read the best books first, or you may not have a chance to read them at all.

Henry David Thoreau

Short Book Quotes

Books are good enough in their own way, but they are a poor substitute for life.

Robert Louis Stevenson

I am an Anglo-Catholic in religion, a classicist in literature and a royalist in politics.

Ideally a book would have no order to it, and the reader would have to discover his own.

Books serve to show a man that those original thoughts of his aren't very new at all.

Abraham Lincoln

The love of learning, the sequestered nooks, And all the sweet serenity of books.

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Literature - creative literature - unconcerned with sex, is inconceivable.

Books are like imprisoned souls till someone takes them down from a shelf and frees them.

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

More Book Quotes

My books are like water; those of the great geniuses are wine. (Fortunately) everybody drinks water.

If one cannot enjoy reading a book over and over again, there is no use in reading it at all.

Isn't it strange that I who have written only unpopular books should be such a popular fellow?

Albert Einstein

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

All books are divisible into two classes, the books of the hour, and the books of all time.

Write books only if you are going to say in them the things you would never dare confide to anyone.

Emile M. Cioran

An apology for the devil: it must be remembered that we have heard one side of the case. God has written all the books.

I am mortified to be told that, in the United States of America, the sale of a book can become a subject of inquiry, and of criminal inquiry too.

Thomas Jefferson

The reason why so few good books are written is that so few people who can write know anything.

Walter Bagehot

There is a great discovery still to be made in literature, that of paying literary men by the quantity they do not write.

Books are to be distinguished by the grandeur of their topics even more than by the manner in which they are treated.

Henry David Thoreau

The advice of the elders to young men is very apt to be as unreal as a list of the hundred best books.

Oliver Wendell Holmes

Literature is strewn with the wreckage of men who have minded beyond reason the opinions of others.

The reason that there are so few good books written is that so few people who write know anything.

Walter Bagehot

Censorship ends in logical completeness when nobody is allowed to read any books except the books that nobody reads.

George Bernard Shaw

Life being very short, and the quiet hours of it few, we ought to waste none of them in reading valueless books.

All that mankind has done, thought or been: it is lying as in magic preservation in the pages of books.

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

Benjamin Disraeli

A single conversation across the table with a wise man is better than ten years mere study of books.

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

A young man who wishes to remain a sound atheist cannot be too careful of his reading.

He who studies books alone will know how things ought to be, and he who studies men will know how they are.

Charles Caleb Colton

Some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested.

All modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn.

Ernest Hemingway

The most important thing about Spaceship Earth - an instruction book didn't come with it.

R. Buckminster Fuller

That is sad until one recalls how many bad books the world may yet be spared because of the busyness of writers.

Making a book is a craft, like making a clock; it needs more than native wit to be an author.

Jean de la Bruyere

One performs a very different act when reading a movie and when reading a novel. Your attention behaves differently.

We're not in love with Literature all the time - especially when you have to teach it every day.

Howard Nemerov

Many of my books have begun with the title, because naming a work already in progress makes no sense to me.

Guillermo Cabrera Infante

Reading made Don Quixote a gentleman, but believing what he read made him mad.

George Bernard Shaw

Books are not made for furniture, but there is nothing else that so beautifully furnishes a house.

Henry Ward Beecher

Never loan a book to someone if you expect to get it back. Loaning books is the same as giving them away.

Be careful about reading health books. You may die of a misprint.

The reason Saul Bellow doesn't talk to me anymore is because he knows his new novels are not worth reading.

Leslie Fiedler

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

John Locke

Education begins the gentleman, but reading, good company and reflection must finish him.

John Locke

I hate books; they only teach us to talk about things we know nothing about.

Jean Jacques Rousseau

It is a good thing for an uneducated man to read books of quotations.

Winston Churchill

Newspaper readership is declining like crazy. In fact, there's a good chance that nobody is reading my column.

The total absence of humor from the Bible is one of the most singular things in all literature.

Alfred North Whitehead

I love everything that's old, - old friends, old times, old manners, old books, old wine.

Oliver Goldsmith

'Tis pleasant, sure, to see one's name in print. A book's a book, although there's nothing in 't.

Literature for me isn't a workaday job, but something which involves desires, dreams and fantasy.

Antonio Tabucchi

A book is a garden, an orchard, a storehouse, a party, a company by the way, a counselor, a multitude of counselors.

Charles Baudelaire

We have talked long enough in this country about equal rights. It is time now to write the next chapter - and to write it in the books of law.

Lyndon B. Johnson

The books one has written in the past have two surprises in store: one couldn't write them again, and wouldn't want to.

One sheds one's sicknesses in books - repeats and presents again one's emotions, to be master of them.

David Herbert Lawrence

I would rather be poor in a cottage full of books than a king without the desire to read.

Thomas B. Macaulay

Explore book quotes about books, reading and the power of words, drawn from a broad collection of notable voices. Sections such as Famous Book Quotes, Inspirational Book Quotes make the page easier to browse by intent, while links to Teacher Quotes and Education Quotes connect closely related ideas. Each quote can also lead readers to an eligible author page for deeper browsing.