Book Reading Quotes - Page 8

• I learned little save that most of the deeds, good and bad both, incurring opprobrium or plaudits or reward either, within the scope of man's abilities, had already been performed and were to be learned about only from books.

  William Faulkner

  Book, Reading, Men

  William Faulkner, Noel Polk (1987). “Absalom, Absalom!, typescript setting copy and miscellaneous material”, Facsimiles-Garl

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• After all, I believe it is the style of thought entirely, and the style of expression, which makes the difference in books.

  Henry David Thoreau

  Believe, Book, Reading

  Henry David Thoreau (2013). “Delphi Complete Works of Henry David Thoreau (Illustrated)”, p.2129, Delphi Classics

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• I have only ever read one book in my life, and that is White Fang. It's so frightfully good I've never bothered to read another.

  Nancy Mitford

  Book, Reading, White

  1945 The Pursuit of Love, ch.9.

  8 Copy quote

  Show source

• A truly good book attracts very little favor to itself. It is so true that it teaches me better than to read it. I must soon lay it down and commence living on its hint. When I read an indifferent book, it seems the best thing I can do, but the inspiring volume hardly leaves me leisure to finish its latter pages. It is slipping out of my fingers while I read. It creates no atmosphere in which it may be perused, but one in which its teachings may be practiced. It confers on me such wealth that I lay it down with regret. What I began by reading I must finish by acting.

  Henry David Thoreau

  Regret, Book, Teaching

  5 Copy quote

• Traversing a slow page, to come upon a lode of the pure shining metal is to exult inwardly for greedy hours.

  Kathleen Norris

  Book, Reading, Shining

  Kathleen Thompson Norris (1955). “The Best of Kathleen Norris”, Garden City, N.Y. : Hanover House, 1955 .

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• A book should contain pure discoveries, glimpses of terra firma, though by shipwrecked mariners, and not the art of navigation by those who have never been out of sight of land.

  Henry David Thoreau

  Art, Book, Reading

  Henry David Thoreau (2016). “A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers”, p.68, Xist Publishing

  7 Copy quote

  Show source

• Before entering the seminary, I had not encountered the life-changing potential of reading as a source of meaning, as a way of ordering one's inner life, and being rooted in the world.

  James Carroll

  Life Changing, Book, Reading

  4 Copy quote

• Boredom is a certain sign that we are allowing our faculties to rust in idleness.

  William Ralph Inge

  Book, Reading, Boredom

  4 Copy quote

• Some men look at Constitutions with sanctimonious reverence, and deem them, like the ark of the covenant, too sacred to be touched. They ascribe to the men of the preceding age a wisdom more than human, and suppose what they did to be beyond amendment. I knew that age well; I belonged to and labored with it. It deserved well of its country. It was very like the present, but without the experience of the present; and forty years of experience in Government is worth a century of book-reading; and this they would say themselves, were they to rise from the dead.

  Thomas Jefferson

  Country, Book, Reading

  1816 Letter to Samuel Kercheval, 12 Jul.

  14 Copy quote

  Show source

• I can't wait to do the normal things. Like just doing your own groceries. Looking for your own tomatoes. I just can't wait to get up in the morning and look awful. I'm looking forward to getting bored.

  Celine Dion

  Morning, Reading, Book

  9 Copy quote

• There is no sin worse in life than being boring.

  Paris Hilton

  Book, Reading, Sin

  Paris Hilton (2012). “Confessions of an Heiress: A Tongue-In-Chic Peek Behind the Pose”, p.6, Simon and Schuster

  7 Copy quote

  Show source

• A well-stocked mind is safe from boredom.

  Arthur C. Clarke

  Book, Reading, Boredom

  Arthur C. Clarke (2012). “Childhood’s End”, p.125, RosettaBooks

  9 Copy quote

  Show source

• The worst thing in life is boredom. When people don't know what to do with themselves, they are very, very poor.

  Alice Herz-Sommer

  Reading, Book, Things In Life

  29 Copy quote

• Consider what you have in the smallest chosen library. A company of the wisest and wittiest men that could be picked out of all civil countries, in a thousand years, have set in best order the results of their learning and wisdom.

  Ralph Waldo Emerson

  Country, Book, Reading

  Ralph Waldo Emerson (2013). “Delphi Complete Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson (Illustrated)”, p.2472, Delphi Classics

  18 Copy quote

  Show source

• I have been interested in the 12th century since my 20s when it was very fashionable to say of anybody with whom you disagreed, which was basically anybody over the age of 30, "One of the great minds of the 12th century", and one day I thought, "I don't know anything about the 12 century." So I started buying books, reading about it, and I discovered it was a period of great flowering, it was a Renaissance before what we think is the Renaissance, the Italian Renaissance of the 16th century.

  Yitzhak Rabin

  Book, Reading, Italian

  5 Copy quote

• Who needs a stupid grampa-loving, book-reading, good-smelling boy who I like to talk to?

  Cecil Castellucci

  Stupid, Book, Reading

  4 Copy quote

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

  Voltaire

  Book, Reading, Savages

  Voltaire (2016). “Voltaire – The Philosophical Works: Treatise On Tolerance, Philosophical Dictionary, Candide, Letters on England, Plato’s Dream, Dialogues, The Study of Nature, Ancient Faith and Fable, Zadig…: From the French writer, historian and philosopher, famous for his wit, his attacks on the established Catholic Church, and his advocacy of freedom of religion and freedom of expression”, p.390, e-artnow

  6 Copy quote

  Show source

• In reading, one should notice and fondle details.

  Vladimir Nabokov

  Book, Reading, Details

  Vladimir Nabokov (2017). “Lectures on Literature”, p.1, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• The return to a favorite novel is generally tied up with changes in oneself that must be counted as improvements, but have the feel of losses. It is like going back to a favorite house, country, person; nothing is where it belongs, including one's heart.

  Mary McCarthy

  Country, Book, Reading

  Mary McCarthy (1985). “Occasional prose”, Harcourt

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• The publishers and others should quit worrying about losing customers to TV. The guy who can sit through a trio of deodorant commercials to look at Flashgun Casey or swallow a flock of beer and loan-shark spiels in order to watch a couple of fourth-rate club fighters rub noses on the ropes is not losing any time from book reading.

  Raymond Chandler

  Couple, Book, Reading

  Raymond Chandler, Tom Hiney, Frank MacShane (2002). “The Raymond Chandler Papers: Selected Letters and Nonfiction, 1909-1959”, p.69, Grove Press

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• O, let my books be then the eloquence and dumb presages of my speaking breast.

  William Shakespeare

  Book, Reading, Dumb

  Sonnet 23

  7 Copy quote

  Show source

• in reading ... stories, you can be many different people in many different places, doing things you would never have a chance to do in ordinary life. It's amazing that those twenty-six little marks of the alphabet can arrange themselves on the pages of a book and accomplish all that. Readers are lucky - they will never be bored or lonely.

  Natalie Babbitt

  Lonely, Book, Reading

  13 Copy quote

• It's not an accident that successful people read more books.

  Seth Godin

  Motivational, Success, Reading

  Seth Godin (2010). “Linchpin: Are You Indispensable?”, p.110, Penguin

  19 Copy quote

  Show source

• This is beautiful indeed; the colored people have given this to the head of the government, and that government once sanctioned laws that would not permit its people to learn enough to enable them to read this book.

  Sojourner Truth

  Beautiful, Book, Reading

  Sojourner Truth (1998). “Narrative of Sojourner Truth”, p.117, Penguin

  23 Copy quote

  Show source

• I read books. Avidly, ardently! As if my life depended upon it.

  Joyce Carol Oates

  Book, Reading, Ifs

  Joyce Carol Oates (2009). “The Faith of a Writer: Life, Craft, Art”, p.8, Zondervan

  5 Copy quote

  Show source