Best quotes on books, aphorisms, citations, quotations by various very popular and wise authors who explain us the great real value of written work of art. What’s more at the end of the article you will find a link to download a free E-book edited by Carl William Brown.
The multitude of books is making us ignorant.
Francois-Marie Arouet de Voltaire
Be careful about reading health books. You may die of a misprint.
Mark Twain
The most famous religious texts are only literary books, but luckily the most famous texts of literature are not religious books.
Carl William Brown
Books are the treasured wealth of the world and the fit inheritance of generations and nations.
Henry David Thoreau
A book should serve as the axe for the frozen sea within us.
Franz Kafka
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
There is no end to education. It is not that you read a book, pass an examination, and finish with education. The whole of life, from the moment you are born to the moment you die, is a process of learning.
Jiddu Krishnamurti
You cannot open a book without learning something.
Confucius
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
Every book is a quotation; and every house is a quotation out of all forests, and mines, and stone quarries; and every man is a quotation from all his ancestors.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
The aphorism in which I am the first master among Germans, are the forms of ‘eternity’; my ambition is to say in ten sentences what everyone else says in a book – what everyone else does not say in a book.
Friedrich Nietzsche
When I read a book I seem to read it with my eyes only, but now and then I come across a passage, perhaps only a phrase, which has a meaning for me, and it becomes part of me.
W. Somerset Maugham
A book is a fragile creature, it suffers the wear of time, it fears rodents, the elements and clumsy hands. so the librarian protects the books not only against mankind but also against nature and devotes his life to this war with the forces of oblivion.
Umberto Eco
Except a living man, there is nothing more wonderful than a book.
Charles Kingsley
A good book is the precious lifeblood of a master spirit.
John Milton
Books are not absolutely dead things, but do contain a potency of life in them….I know they are as lively and as vigorously productive as those fabulous dragon’s teeth and being sown up and down, may chance to spring up armed men.
John Milton
There are books of which the backs and covers are by far the best parts.
Charles Dickens
No man understands a deep book until he has seen and lived at least part of its contents.
Ezra Pound
Any book that helps a child to form a habit of reading, to make reading one of his deep and continuing needs, is good for him.
Maya Angelou
There are worse crimes than burning books. One of them is not reading them.
Ray Bradbury
A multitude of books distracts the mind.
Socrates
No ornament of a house can compare with books; they are constant company in a room, even when you are not reading them.
Harriet Beecher Stowe
You don’t have to burn books to destroy a culture. Just get people to stop reading them.
Ray Bradbury
Reading about nature is fine, but if a person walks in the woods and listens carefully, he can learn more than what is in books, for they speak with the voice of God.
George Washington Carver
The worst thing about new books is that they keep us from reading the old ones.
John Wooden
The books that help you most are those which make you think that most. The hardest way of learning is that of easy reading; but a great book that comes from a great thinker is a ship of thought, deep freighted with truth and beauty.
Pablo Neruda
The reading of all good books is like a conversation with the finest minds of past centuries.
Rene Descartes
Read the best books first, or you may not have a chance to read them at all.
Henry David Thoreau
You don’t have to burn books to destroy a culture. Just get people to stop reading them.
Ray Bradbury
A classic is something that everybody wants to have read and nobody wants to read.
Mark Twain
My books are water; those of the great geniuses are wine – everybody drinks water.
Mark Twain
Old books that have ceased to be of service should no more be abandoned than should old friends who have ceased to give pleasure.
Sir Peregrine Worsthorne
The books that the world calls immoral are the books that show the world its own shame.
Oscar Wilde
The reason why so few good books are written is that so few people who can write know anything. I’ve put my genius into my life; I’ve only put my talent into my works.
Oscar Wilde
My Alma mater was books, a good library… I could spend the rest of my life reading, just satisfying my curiosity.
Malcolm X
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.
Samuel Johnson
A book worth reading is worth buying.
John Ruskin
Life being very short, and the quiet hours of it few, we ought to waste none of them in reading valueless books.
John Ruskin
We shouldn’t teach great books; we should teach a love of reading.
B. F. Skinner
Some of the most famous books are the least worth reading. Their fame was due to their having done something that needed to be doing in their day. The work is done and the virtue of the book has expired.
Moliere
Promiscuity is like never reading past the first page. Monogamy is like reading the same book over and over.
Mason Cooley
Nothing written for pay is worth printing. Only what has been written against the market.
Ezra Pound
The reading of all good books is like a conversation with all the finest men of past centuries.
Rene Descartes
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
When we are alone and feeling low, a good book can listen to us and we can gather comfort, consolation and strength!
Carl William Brown
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
Never read any book that is not a year old.
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.
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 there was before.
Cliff Fadiman
Read much, but not many books.
Benjamin Franklin
After all manner of professors have done their best for us, the place we are to get knowledge is in books. The true university of these days is a collection of books.
Thomas Carlyle
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
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
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
It is from books that wise people derive consolation in the troubles of life.
Victor Hugo
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
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
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 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
An author can write a book, but only the readers can make it speak and by voicing it, make people to listen to it.
Carl William Brown
Many readers judge of the power of a book by the shock it gives their feelings — as some savage tribes determine the power of muskets by their recoil; that being considered best which fairly prostrates the purchaser.
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
The multitude of books is a great evil. There is no limit to this fever for writing.
Martin Luther
Everything in the world exists to end up in a book.
Stephane Mallarme
Any book that helps a child to form a habit of reading, to make reading one of his deep and continuing needs, is good for him.
Richard McKenna
A successful book cannot afford to be more than ten percent new.
Marshall McLuhan
The chief knowledge that a man gets from reading books, is the knowledge that very few of them are worth reading.
H. L. Mencken
There are people who read too much: bibliobibuli. I know some who are constantly drunk on books, as other men are drunk on whiskey or religion. They wander through this most diverting and stimulating of worlds in a haze, seeing nothing and hearing nothing.
H. L. Mencken
There are two kinds of books. Those that no one reads and those that no one ought to read.
H. L. Mencken
The books one reads in childhood, and perhaps most of all the bad and good bad books, create in one’s mind a sort of false map of the world, a series of fabulous countries into which one can retreat at odd moments throughout the rest of life, and which in some cases can survive a visit to the real countries which they are supposed to represent.
George Orwell
The book you don’t read won’t help.
Jim Rohn
You should read books like you take medicine, by advice, and not by advertisement.
John Ruskin
What I like best is a book that’s at least funny once in a while. What really knocks me out is a book that, when you’re all done reading it, you wish the author that wrote it was a terrific friend of yours and you could call him up on the phone whenever you felt like it. That doesn’t happen much, though.
J. D. Salinger
Without books the development of civilization would have been impossible. They are the engines of change, windows on the world, “Lighthouses” as the poet said “erected in the sea of time.” They are companions, teachers, magicians, bankers of the treasures of the mind, Books are humanity in print.
Arthur Schopenhauer
Books must be read as deliberately and reservedly as they were written.
Henry David Thoreau
How many a man has dated a new era in his life from the reading of a book! The book exists for us, perchance, that will explain our miracles and reveal new ones. At present unutterable things we may find somewhere uttered.
Henry David Thoreau
Read the best books first, or you may not have a chance to read them at all.
Henry David Thoreau
To read well, that is, to read true books in a true spirit, is a noble exercise, and one that will task the reader more than any other exercise which the customs of the day esteem. It requires a training such as the athletes underwent, the steady intention almost of the whole life to this object.
Henry David Thoreau
The man who does not read books has no advantage over the man that can not read them.
Mark Twain
The book to read is not the one which thinks for you, but the one which makes you think. No book in the world equals the Bible for that.
Author Unknown
Books are the legacies that a great genius leaves to mankind, which are delivered down from generation to generation as presents to the posterity of those who are yet unborn.
Joseph Addison
Beware of the person of one book.
St. Thomas Aquinas
A real book is not one that we read, but one that reads us.
W. H. Auden
Some books are undeservedly forgotten; none are undeservedly remembered.
W. H. Auden
Some books are to be tasted; others to be swallowed; and some few to be chewed and digested.
Francis Bacon
Books are men of higher stature; the only men that speak aloud for future times to hear.
E.S. Barrett
The printing press is either the greatest blessing or the greatest curse of modern times, sometimes one forgets which it is.
James M. Barrie
A book is a garden, an orchard, a storehouse, a party, a company by the way, a counselor, a multitude of counselors.
Henry Ward Beecher
A book may be compared to your neighbor: if it be good, it cannot last too long; if bad, you cannot get rid of it too early.
Rupert Brooke
The lessons taught in great books are misleading. The commerce in life is rarely so simple and never so just.
Anita Brookner
Begin to read a book that will help you move toward your dream.
Les Brown
The oldest books are still only just out to those who have not read them.
Samuel Butler
A novel is never anything, but a philosophy put into images.
Albert Camus
A good novel tells us the truth about it’s hero; but a bad novel tells us the truth about its author.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
The best effect of any book, is that it excites the reader to self-activity.
Thomas Carlyle
Reading a book is like re-writing it for yourself. You bring to a novel, anything you read, all your experience of the world. You bring your history and you read it in your own terms.
Angela Carter
Books are standing counselors and preachers, always at hand, and always disinterested; having this advantage over oral instructors, that they are ready to repeat their lesson as often as we please.
Oswald Chambers
Books are the blessed chloroform of the mind.
Robert Chambers
Most books today seemed to have been written overnight from books read the day before.
Sebastien-Roch Nicolas De Chamfort
Every man is a volume if you know how to read him.
William Ellery Channing
A room without books is like a body without a soul.
Marcus T. Cicero
Many books require no thought from those who read them, and for a very simple reason: they made no such demand upon those who wrote them. Those works, therefore, are the most valuable, that set our thinking faculties in the fullest operation. understand them.
Lord Clarendon
Books, like friends, should be few and well chosen. Like friends, too, we should return to them again and again for, like true friends, they will never fail us — never cease to instruct — never cloy.
Charles Caleb Colton
Books should to one of these fours ends conduce, for wisdom, piety, delight, or use.
Sir John Denham
Some books leave us free and some books make us free.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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 over-praise a long book, because one has got through it.
Edward M. Forster
The books that everybody admires are those that nobody reads.
Anatole France
Read much, but not many books.
Benjamin Franklin
Books are those faithful mirrors that reflect to our mind the minds of sages and heroes.
Edward Gibbon
Some books seem to have been written, not to teach us anything, but to let us know that the author has known something.
Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
Books give not wisdom where none was before. But where some is, there reading makes it more.
John Harington
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
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 worst thing about new books is that they keep us from reading the old ones.
Joseph Joubert
Books are the money of Literature, but only the counters of Science.
Thomas H. Huxley
Books that you carry to the fire, and hold readily in your hand, are most useful after all.
Samuel Johnson
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
I can’t bear art that you can walk round and admire. A book should be either a bandit or a rebel or a man in the crowd.
D. H. Lawrence
A vacuum of ideas affects people differently than a vacuum of air, otherwise readers of books would be constantly collapsing.
Georg C. Lichtenberg
All books are either dreams or swords.
Amy Lowell
The multitude of books is a great evil. There is no limit to this fever for writing.
Martin Luther
To read too many books is harmful.
Zedong Mao
A successful book cannot afford to be more than ten percent new.
Marshall McLuhan
Books and marriage go ill together.
Jean Baptiste Moliere
A book calls for pen, ink, and a writing desk; today the rule is that pen, ink, and a writing desk call for a book.
Friedrich Nietzsche
A dose of poison can do its work but once. A bad book can go on poisoning minds for generations.
William Murray
No man understands a deep book until he has seen and lived at least part of its contents.
Ezra Pound
Books are preserved parts of minds.
Japanese Proverb
The book you don’t read won’t help.
Jim Rohn
Books are like a mirror. If an ass looks in, you can’t expect an angel to look out.
Arthur Schopenhauer
Buying books would be a good thing if one could also buy the time to read them…
Arthur Schopenhauer
O, let my books be then the eloquence and dumb presages of my speaking breast.
William Shakespeare
No furniture is so charming as books.
Sydney Smith
Books are good enough in their own way, but they are a mighty bloodless substitute for life.
Robert Louis Stevenson
A great book should leave you with many experiences and slightly exhausted at the end. You should live several lives while reading it.
William Styron
Books, like proverbs, receive their chief value from the stamp and esteem of the ages through which they have passed
Sir William Temple
Quotes and aphorisms on Books (Free PDF Edited by C.W. Brown);
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To find out more about the importance of reading you can also read:
The nature and essence of literature
