Books Quotes

Everyone who knows how to read has it in their power to magnify themselves to multiply the ways in which they exist to make their life full significant and interesting.

~ Aldous Huxley

Having your book turned into a movie is like seeing your oxen turned into bouillon cubes.

~ John He Carri

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

~ Arthur Balfour

If a book is worth reading at all it is worth reading more than once. Suspense is the lowest of excitants designed to take your breath away when the brain and heart crave to linger in nobler enjoyment. Suspense drags you on appreciation causes you to linger.

~ William Gerhardie

If you would not be forgotten as soon as you are dead either write things worth reading or do things worth writing.

~ Benjamin Franklin

Neither is a dictionary a bad book to read. There is no cant in it no excess of explanation and it is full of suggestions the raw material of possible poems and histories.

~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

Nothing links man to man like the frequent passage from hand to hand of a good book.

~ Walter Sickert

Some books are undeservedly forgotten none are undeservedly remembered.

~ W. H. Auden

The delight of opening a new pursuit or a new course of reading imparts the vivacity and novelty of youth even to old age.

~ Benjamin Disraeli

The dust and silence of the upper shelf.

~ Bob Macaulay

The fact of knowing how to read is nothing the whole point is knowing what to read.

~ Jacques Ellul

The habit of reading is the only enjoyment in which there is no alloy it lasts when all other pleasures fade.

~ Anthony Trollope

The possession of a book becomes a substitute for reading it.

~ Anthony Burgess

The responsibility of a dictionary is to record a language not set its style.

~ Phillip Babcock Gove

To finish is both a relief and a release from an extraordinarily pleasant prison.

~ Robert Burchfield

What is reading but silent conversation?

~ Walter Savage Landor

'Sartor Resartus' is simply unreadable and for me that always sort of spoils a book.

~ Harry S. Truman

You should read it though there is much that is skip-worthy.

~ Herbert Asquith

The greatest masterpiece in literature is only a dictionary out of order.

~ Jean Cocteau

When you read a classic you do not see in the book more than you did before. You see more in you than there was before.

~ Clifton Fadiman

Properly we should read for power. Man reading should be man intensely alive. The book should be a ball of light in one's hand.

~ Ezra Pound

Best-sellerism is the star system of the book world. A (best-seller) is a celebrity among books. It is a book known primarily (sometimes exclusively) for its well-knownness.

~ Daniel J. Boorstin

The central theme of the novel is that they were glad to see each other.

~ Gertrude Stein

Reading after a certain (time) diverts the mind too much from its creative pursuits. Any man who reads too much and uses his own brain too little falls into lazy habits of thinking.

~ Albert Einstein

The most technologically efficient machine that man has ever invented is the book.

~ Northrop Frye

Literature is news that stays news.

~ Ezra Pound

Just the knowledge that a good book is awaiting one at the end of a long day makes that day happier.

~ Kathleen Norris

Laws die books never.

~ Edward Bulwer-Lytton

Master books but do not let them master you. Read to live not live to read.

~ Edward Bulwer-Lytton

A good book is the precious life-blood of a master spirit embalmed and treasured up on purpose to a life beyond life.

~ John Milton

Any book which is at all important should be re-read immediately.

~ Arthur Schopenhauer

Do give books - religious or otherwise - for Christmas. They're never fattening seldom sinful and permanently personal.

~ Lenore Hershey

Never lend books - nobody ever returns them the only books I have in my library are those which people have lent me.

~ Anatole France

Discretion is not the better part of biography.

~ Lytton Strachey

A dictionary should be descriptive not prescriptive.

~ Phillip Babcock Gove

Book lovers never go to bed alone.

~ Anonymous

It circulated for five years through the halls of fifteen publishers and finally ended up with Vanguard Press which as you can see is rather deep into the alphabet.

~ Patrick Dennis

The first book of the nation is the dictionary of its language.

~ Contanitin

A novel is a mirror carried along a main road.

~ Stendhal

I read part of it all the way through.

~ Sam Goldwyn