Inspirational Quotes on Books

“Everywhere I have sought rest and found it not except sitting apart in a nook with a little book.”

“Do not be influenced by the importance of the writer, and whether his learning be great or small, but let the love of pure truth draw you to read. Do not inquire, Who said this? but pay attention to what is said.”

“Beware of the person of one book.”

“If time is precious, no book that will not improve by repeated readings deserves to be read at all.”

“An index is a necessary implement, without which a large author is but a labyrinth without a clue to direct the readers within.”

“A book that is shut is but a block.”

“Learning hath gained most by those books by which the printers have lost.”

“Show me a man's books and show me a man's companions--and I will tell you what sort of a man he is.”

“Nothing could ever matter again but the things that were eternal... There are so many stories already in the world, and so many are splendid and great, that it is difficult to believe it can be worth the telling. But if only I can tell it under direction, it will carry at least one quality of clear, running water- sincerity.”

“Books are the treasured wealth of the world and the fit inheritance of generations and nations. Books, the oldest and the best, stand naturally and rightfully on the shelves of every cottage.”

“But in reading great literature I become a thousand men and yet remain myself.”

“If literary scholarship and criticism are regarded as activities ancillary to literature, then their sole function is to multiply, prolong, and safeguard experiences of good reading. A system which heads us off from abstraction by being centred on literature in operation is what we need.”

“At a first reading of some great work, they are ‘knocked flat’. Criticise it? No, by God, but read it again. The judgement ‘This must be a great work’ may be long delayed. But in later life we can hardly help evaluating as we go along; it has become a habit. We thus fail of that inner silence, that emptying out of ourselves, by which we ought to make room for the total reception of the work. The failure is greatly aggravated if, while we read, we know that we are under some obligation to express a judgement; as when we read a book in order to review it, or a friend’s MS. in order to advise him. Then the pencil gets to work on the margin and phrases of censure or approval begin forming themselves in our mind. All this activity impedes reception.”

“Una storia per bambini che piace solo ai bambini non è un granché.”

“Isn’t it funny the way some combinations of words can give you – apart from their meaning – a thrill like music?”

“Poetry is, after all, only nonsense and justifies what would be considered impudence if written in prose.”

“for we are all divorced from life, we are all cripples, every one of us, more or less. We are so divorced from it that we feel at once a sort of loathing for real life, and so cannot bear to be reminded of it. Why, we have come almost to looking upon real life as an effort, almost as hard work, and we are all privately agreed that it is better in books.”

“Cosa c’è di meglio, in realtà, che starsene la sera accanto al fuoco con un bel libro in mano, mentre il vento sbatte contro le persiane e arde il lume della lampada?”

“La sua logica è straordinariamente lucida e fredda e invariabilmente lo porta fuori strada. Ma all'improvviso interviene la poesia in lui a riportarlo in carreggiata.”

“A man reading the Dickens novel wished that it might never end. Men read a Dickens story six times because they knew it so well.”