Top 100 Worth Reading Quotes
#1. We measure the success of schools not by the kinds of human beings they promote but by whatever increases in reading scores they chalk up. We have allowed quantitative standards, so central to the adult economic system, to become the principal yardstick for our definition of our children's worth.
Kenneth Keniston
#2. The book is worth reading, in part because it is enjoyable to read of
other people's folly, not to mention their avarice and stupidity."
Roger Lowenstein, reviewing "Devil Take the Hindmost: a History
of Financial Speculation", WSJ 6-1-99
Roger Lowenstein
#4. If you would be remembered, write a book worth the reading or live a life worth the writing about.
Benjamin Franklin
#5. Anything John Stott says is worth listening to. Anything he writes is worth reading. Basic Christianity is not only a classic must-read for every believer; it is truly a blessing preserved on the written page for the enrichment of this generation and those to come.
Anne Graham Lotz
#6. Don't write for money. Write because you love to do something. If you write for money, you won't write anything worth reading.
Ray Bradbury
#7. Read something worth writing about or write something worth reading about
Anonymous
#8. I entered a poem in a poetry contest around 1987, and the poem won and I received $1,000 for it. That made me realize that maybe what I was writing was worth reading to people. After that, for some reason, I turned to novels and I've written mainly novels ever since.
Sharon Creech
#9. If a book isn't self-explanatory, then it isn't worth reading.
Paulo Coelho
#10. Let the enemy fall by their swords. Words not worth reading die their own death. But our Words will be Told!
K.A. Gunn
#12. Either write something worth reading or do something worth writing.
Benjamin Franklin
#13. To live in books is cowardly
but people are not worth investigation.
Lily Koppel
#14. All writers begin as readers, and the ones worth reading continue life as more prolific readers than writers.
Thomas Swick
#15. Who knows who you are ... A person is a novel: you don't know how it will end until the very last page. Otherwise, it wouldn't be worth reading to the very end ...
Yevgeny Zamyatin
#16. I'm being forced to challenge ideas that have kept me safe for so long. There's an entire library of information in my head, and suddenly I can't decide if any of it is worth reading.
Louise Gornall
#17. What I look for is identifying what the utility of a character is to the telling of the story overall. If I can identify that from reading the script, then I've got a clear idea of whether or not I think the character is worth playing.
Harrison Ford
#18. The first reading of a Will, where a person dies worth anything considerable, generally affords a true test of the relations' love to the deceased.
Samuel Richardson
#19. Often you must turn your stylus to erase, if you hope to write anything worth a second reading.
Horace
#20. The infant New York Times boasted that no newspaper printing what was really worth reading ever perished for lack of readers.
Harold Holzer
#21. The Snow Leopard's Tale is mesmeric. Tom McIntyre has compressed so many things into so few pages that I can think of only a few other short books that can compare. It was worth the wait for all of us who look forward to reading anything with his name under the title.
John Barsness
#22. I'm alive. This might be the first time I've ever really been alive in my whole fucking miserable life. This moment is what causes wars to start. The only books worth reading have been written about those lips.
Gregory Sherl
#23. ...it is very well worth while to be tormented for two or three years of one's life, for the sake of being able to read all the rest of it. Consider - if reading had not been taught, Mrs. Radcliffe would have written in vain - or perhaps might not have written at all.
Jane Austen
#24. Writing is a solitary pursuit and I think you have to be partially at peace with yourself, but it's the other part that's usually producing the stuff worth reading.
Craig Johnson
#25. In my high-minded and naive way, I believed the only books worth reading were the classics.
Maria Semple
#26. People have pointed out evidences of personal feeling in my notices as if they were accusing me of a misdemeanor, not knowing that criticism written without personal feeling is not worth reading. It is the capacity for making good or bad art a personal matter that makes a man a critic.
George Bernard Shaw
#27. Don't leave your life a blank page. Make each word count and leave behind something worth reading.
Mae East
#28. Start reading. Your two cents will be worth much more.
Harsh Bhatnagar
#29. Only one book is worth reading: the heart.
Ajahn Chah
#30. I have finally figured out the meaning of life: there's no such thing. And that's a beautiful thing, because that means that WE get to choose it ourselves. Life has no meaning besides the meaning you give it. You are indeed the author of your destiny. So why not write a book worth reading?
Dean Bokhari
#31. The one man who should never attempt an explanation of a poem is its author. If the poem can be improved by it's author's explanations it never should have been published, and if the poem cannot be improved by its author's explanations the explanations are scarcely worth reading.
Archibald MacLeish
#32. People say that a picture is worth a thousand words, but sometimes a mighty quotation is worth more than a thousand pictures.
Jakub Marian
#33. If there were nothing else, reading would
obviously
be worth living for.
Nuala O'Faolain
#34. 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
#35. Into the paradise of euphony, the good poet must introduce hell. Broken paradises are the only kind worth reading.
Mark Doty
#36. Writing novels worth reading will bugger up your mind, jeopardize your relationships, and distend your life.
David Mitchell
#37. Any book worth banning is a book worth reading.
Isaac Asimov
#38. The public library my parents took me to in Fort Worth had the children's section next to the SF/F section, so I was reading adult SF/F at a very young age.
Martha Wells
#39. 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
#40. It's not my fault you have the attention span of a gnat, capable of only thumbing through the crap on Facebook, instead of reading something of worth that can change your life. No, I'm not talking about Oprah's or Ellen's book either.
Dara Reidyr
#41. Living is worth the effort if only because without life we could not read or imagine stories.
Mario Vargas-Llosa
#42. Most of the literary classics are worth reading, if you've nothing better to do.
Edward Abbey
#43. In an article on Bunyan lately published in the "Contemporary Review" - the only article on the subject worth reading on the subject I ever saw (yes, thank you, I am familiar with Macaulay's patronizing prattle about "The Pilgrim's Progress") etc.
George Bernard Shaw
#44. Any heroine worth reading about will one day find herself on the moors of a devastating personal crisis. For the most part, we must traverse them alone.
Chapter 10 Steadfastness Jane Eyre
Erin Blakemore
#45. If a book is worth reading, it will most probably be worth reading twice.
Aman Jassal
#46. We properly judge a critic's virtue not by his freedom from error but by the nature of the mistakes he does make, for he makes them, if he is worth reading, because he has in mind something besides his perceptions about art in itself he has in mind the demands that he makes upon life.
Lionel Trilling
#47. I believe reading books is one of the best ways to gain real empathy for people different from ourselves, and helping boys develop empathy for girls is a cause worth fighting for.
Shannon Hale
#49. Great speed in reading is a dubious achievement; it is of value only if what you have to read is not worth reading.
Mortimer J. Adler
#50. A wise man once said that if a book was not worth reading twice it was not worth reading once.
Viktor Arnar Ingolfsson
#51. If a book isn't worth reading over and over again, it isn't worth reading at all.
Oscar Wilde
#52. I think sports makes for good drama because it has all the same ingredients as anything worth reading or listening to or watching. Conflict, desire, heartbreak - it's all there.
Jay Baruchel
#53. I know in this time of great technological advancement, the idea of reading a book seems almost anachronistic, but I think it's worth preserving.
Garth Stein
#54. Jeremiah is a most melancholy prophet. He wails from beginning to end; he is often childish, is rarely indecent, and although it may be blasphemy to say so, he and his 'Lamentations' are really not worth reading.
Annie Besant
#55. Everything worth knowing about the 1980s I learned from obsessively reading Bloom County collections when I was nine and Derek Jarman's diaries when I was twenty.
Ruadhan J. McElroy
#56. He wished he had never come to London. He wished he had never undertaken to revive English magic. He wished he had stayed at Hurtfew Abbey, reading and doing magic for his own pleasure. None of it, he thought, was worth the loss of forty books.
Susanna Clarke
#57. To read a newspaper is to refrain from reading something worth while. The first discipline of education must therefore be to refuse resolutely to feed the mind with canned chatter.
Aleister Crowley
#58. If a book has anything to say, it burns with a quiet laugh, because any book worth its salt points up and out of itself.
Bohumil Hrabal
#59. If a book doesn't inspire you to read more, it was not worth read.
Aman Jassal
#60. I go on writing in both respectable and despised genres because I respect them all, rejoice in their differences, and reject only the prejudice and ignorance that dismisses any book, unread, as not worth reading."
"On Despising Genres," essay
Ursula K. Le Guin
#61. I never know what I am writing. The moment you know what you're writing, you're writing nothing worth reading.
Richard Flanagan
#62. Leave all the afternoon for exercise and recreation, which are as necessary as reading. I will rather say more necessary because health is worth more than learning.
Thomas Jefferson
#63. If you actually succeed in creating a utopia, you've created a world without conflict, in which everything is perfect. And if there's no conflict, there are no stories worth telling - or reading!
Veronica Roth
#64. This even doesn't worth and one dollar just for reading and viewing it!
Deyth Banger
#65. To me, comedians are the last great storytellers because they depict their stories and create their effect with so few words. In the span of a couple minutes, stand-up comics can communicate more emotion than most novels do in hours worth of reading.
Chuck Palahniuk
#66. We did a Tarot
card reading. She told me different things, most of them depressing and
worth forgetting. But what I'll always remember is her prediction of my
death, and how I'd become a kind of ghost, 'wandering' she said, with a
'spiritual restlessness'.
Keith Steinbaum
#67. No book worth reading ever fails to be steeped with the spirit of the person who wrote it.
Paul Leicester Ford
#68. I think any reading is good reading, even if it's commercial fiction. A good story well told is worth the time
Lynn Cahoon
#69. A modern philosopher who has never once suspected himself of being a charlatan must be such a shallow mind that his work is probably not worth reading.
Leszek Kolakowski
#70. If you want your name to be remembered after your death either do something worth writing or write some thing worth reading
Abraham Lincoln
#71. Read a lot. Expect something big, something exalting or deepening from a book. No book is worth reading that isn't worth re-reading.
Susan Sontag
#72. The publishing industry, unsurprisingly, is full of different people who love different things and express that love in different languages. Find the people, the editors and agents, with whom you share some language, and some sense of what makes literature worth reading.
Leslie Jamison
#73. A book isn't worth reading if it's not worth discussing.
Rick Holland
#74. Papa thought that any book worth reading twice was worth owning. So instead of buying desserts, we bought books.
Natalie S. Bober
#75. Time is a great teacher, but unfortunately it kills all its pupils ... - Louis Hector Berlioz
William L.K.
#76. Books can move people, inspire people, change people's lives, and even impact whole societies. They are certainly worth spending an afternoon with.
Jan Surasky
#77. Essayists, like poets, are born and not made, and for one worth remembering, the world is confronted with a hundred not worth reading. Your true essayist is, in a literary sense, the friend of everybody.
William Ernest Henley
#78. If you really want people to pay attention to how you feel, you need to express your feelings in language that's worth reading.
David Starkey
#79. It's doubtful that any fiction worth reading has been produced on a computer running Windows Vista.
Lynn Coady
#80. No one on earth is so boring and insignificant that he or she is not worth writing or reading about ... One thing's for sure - no one but you can be the hero of your story.
Jerry Spinelli
#81. History is worth reading when it tells us truly what the attitude toward life was in the past.
Dorothy Canfield Fisher
#82. Ever since I could read, I've wanted to write a book. I never thought I had anything to write about. Maybe you don't think this is worth writing about. But this book isn't for you. It's for me.
Daniel Willey
#84. It is a tragedy and therefore not worth reading ...
Jane Austen
#85. Before you sleep, read something that is exquisite, and worth remembering.
Desiderius Erasmus
#86. I do not know whether you are fond of chemical reading. There are some things in this science worth reading.
Thomas Jefferson
#89. Make wise choices about what you read. Read only what is necessary or worthwhile. And then take the time to read carefully. One book read with concentration and reflected upon is worth a hundred flashed through without any absorption at all.
Eknath Easwaran
#90. Education ... has produced a vast population able to read but unable to distinguish what is worth reading.
George Macaulay Trevelyan
#91. Not every book has to be loaded with symbolism, irony, or musical language, but it seems to me that every book-at least every one worth reading-is about something.
Stephen King
#92. Is impossible to specify what [consciousness] is, what it does, or why it evolved. Nothing worth reading has been written on it.
Stuart Sutherland
#93. Maybe the one dangerous thing about reading a library's worth of books was the way your imagination got pumped up like a bodybuilder on steroids.
Dean Koontz
#94. The things worth writing about, and the things worth reading about, are the things that feel almost beyond description at the start and are, because of that, frightening.
Douglas Coupland
#95. If you would not be forgotten as soon as you are gone, either write things worth reading or do things worth writing.
Carson McCullers
#96. From forty years' experience of the wretched guess-work of the newspapers of what is not done in open daylight, and of their falsehood even as to that, I rarely think them worth reading, and almost never worth notice.
Thomas Jefferson
#97. A man is like a novel: until the very last page you don't know how it will end. Otherwise it wouldn't even be worth reading.
Yevgeny Zamyatin
#98. The reason Saul Bellow doesn't talk to me anymore is because he knows his new novels are not worth reading.
Leslie Fiedler
#99. I don't read anything anymore. I don't have the eyesight. I read my own copy, that's all. I think I've read everything that's worth reading.
John Gould
#100. There is always a hope for the living.
Life is worth living, no matter what situation you may have encounter.
No situations is permanent.
Lailah Gifty Akita
