Quotes on Reading

QUOTES ON READING

'Classic.' A book which people praise and don't read.

~Mark Twain

The man who does not read good books has no advantage over the man who cannot read them.

~Mark Twain

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

You despise books; you whose lives are absorbed in the vanities of ambition, the pursuit of pleasure or indolence; but remember that all the known world, excepting only savage nations, is governed by books.

~Voltaire

Read, every day, something no one else is reading. Think, every day, something no one else is thinking. Do, every day, something no one else would be silly enough to do. It is bad for the mind to continually be part of unanimity.

~Christopher Morley

Censorship ends in logical completeness when nobody is allowed to read any books except the books that nobody reads.

~George Bernard Shaw

If one cannot enjoy reading a book over and over again, there is no use in reading it at all.

~Oscar Wilde

A classic is something that everybody wants to have read and nobody wants to read.

~Mark Twain

Work: Speech in New York, Nov. 20, 1900

One must be an inventor to read well. There is then creative reading as well as creative writing.

~Ralph Waldo Emerson

The profit of books is according to the sensibility of the reader. The profoundest thought or passion sleeps as in a mine, until an equal mind and heart finds and publishes it.

~Ralph Waldo Emerson

If the riches of the Indies, or the crowns of all the kingdom of Europe, were laid at my feet in exchange for my love of reading, I would spurn them all.

~Ralph Waldo Emerson

The difference between literature and journalism is that journalism is unreadable and literature is not read.

~Oscar Wilde

I suppose every old scholar has had the experience of reading something in a book which was significant to him, but which he could never find again. Sure he is that he read it there, but no one else ever read it, nor can he find it again, though he buy the book and ransack every page.

~Ralph Waldo Emerson

It is what you read when you don't have to that determines what you will be when you can't help it.

~Oscar Wilde

A person who won't read has no advantage over one who can't read.

~Mark Twain

Reading made Don Quixote a gentleman. Believing what he read made him mad.

~George Bernard Shaw

This report, by its very length, defends itself against the risk of being read.

~Winston Churchill

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 length of this document defends it well against the risk of its being read.

~Winston Churchill

Desultory reading is delightful, but to be beneficial, our reading must be carefully directed.

~Lucius Annaeus Seneca

Reading is to the mind, what exercise is to the body. As by the one, health is preserved, strengthened, and invigorated: by the other, virtue (which is the health of the mind) is kept alive, cherished, and confirmed.

~Joseph Addison

Reading maketh a full man; conference a ready man; and writing an exact man.

~Francis Bacon

And the Lord answered me, and said, Write the vision, and make it plain upon tables, that he may run that readeth it.

~Bible

That he that readeth may run over it. [Lat., Ut percurrat qui legerit eum.]

~Bible

Read, mark, learn, and inwardly digest.

~Book of Common Prayer

In science, read, by preference, the newest works; in literature, the oldest. The classic literature is always modern. - Edward George Earle Lytton Bulwer-Lytton, first Baron Lytton,

~Edward George Earle Lytton Bulwer-Lytton, first Baron Lytton

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

~Thomas Carlyle

We have not read an author till we have seen his object, whatever it may be, as he saw it.

~Thomas Carlyle

The mind, relaxing into needful sport, Should turn to writers of an abler sort, Whose wit well managed, and whose classic style, Give truth a lustre, and make wisdom smile.

~William Cowper

But truths on which depends our main concern, That 'tis our shame and misery not to learn, Shine by the side of every path we tread With such a lustre he that runs may read.

~William Cowper

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

~Isaac D'Israeli

I like to be beholden to the great metropolitan English speech, the sea which receives tributaries from every region under heaven. I should as soon think of swimming across the Charles river when I wish to go to Boston, as of reading all my books in originals, when I have them rendered for me in my mother tongue.

~Ralph Waldo Emerson

Our high respect for a well-read man is praise enough for literature.

~Ralph Waldo Emerson

If we encountered a man or rare intellect, we should ask him what books he read.

~Ralph Waldo Emerson

My early and invincible love of reading, . . . I would not exchange for the treasures of India.

~Edward Gibbon

The sagacious reader who is capable of reading between these lines what does not stand written in them, but is nevertheless implied, will be able to form some conception.

~Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

What they're accustomed to is no great matter, But then, alas! they've read an awful deal.

~Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

In a polite age almost every person becomes a reader, and receives more instruction from the Press than the Pulpit.

~Oliver Goldsmith

The first time I read an excellent book, it is to me just as if I had gained a new friend. When I read a book over I have perused before, it resembles the meeting with an old one.

~Oliver Goldsmith

Books have always a secret influence on the understanding; we cannot at pleasure obliterate ideas: he that reads books of science, though without any desire fixed of improvement, will grow more knowing; he that entertains himself with moral or religious treatises, will imperceptibly advance in goodness; the ideas which are often offered to the mind, will at last find a lucky moment when it is disposed to receive them.

~Samuel Johnson

A man ought to read just as inclination leads him; for what he reads as a task will do him little good.

~Samuel Johnson

What is twice read is commonly better remembered that what is transcribed.

~Samuel Johnson

It may be well to wait a century for a reader, as God has waited six thousand years for an observer.

~Johannes Kepler

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 (used pseudonym Elia),

~Charles Lamb (used pseudonym Elia)

Night after night, He sat and bleared his eyes with books.

~Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

To feel most beautifully alive means to be reading something beautiful, ready always to apprehend in the flow of language the sudden flash of poetry.
~Gaston Bachelard

The world may be full of fourth-rate writers but it's also full of fourth-rate readers.
~Stan Barstow

When we read a story, we inhabit it. The covers of the book are like a roof and four walls. What is to happen next will take place within the four walls of the story. And this is possible because the story's voice makes everything its own.
~John Berger

The failure to read good books both enfeebles the vision and strengthens our most fatal tendency--the belief that the here and now is all there is.
~Allan Bloom

'Tis the good reader that makes the good book; a good head cannot read amiss: in every book he finds passages which seem confidences or asides hidden from all else and unmistakeably meant for his ear.
~Ralph Waldo Emerson

To read a writer is for me not merely to get an idea of what he says, but to go off with him and travel in his company.
~André Gide

A man ought to read just as inclination leads him, for what he reads as a task will do him little good.
~Samuel Johnson

What is reading but silent conversation?
~Walter Savage Landor

After all, the world is not a stage--not to me: nor a theatre: nor a show-house of any sort. And art, especially novels, are not little theatres where the reader sits aloft and watches...and sighs, commiserates, condones and smiles. That's what you want a book to be: because it leaves you so safe and superior, with your two-dollar ticket to the show. And that's what my books are not and never will be...Whoever reads me will be in the thick of the scrimmage, and if he doesn't like it if he wants a safe seat in the audience--let him read someone else.
~D. H. Lawrence

Until I feared I would lose it, I never loved to read. One does not love breathing.
~Harper Lee

Readers are plentiful: thinkers are rare.
~Harriet Martineau

I have never known any distress that an hour's reading did not relieve.
~Montesquieu

Much reading is an oppression of the mind, and extinguishes the natural candle, which is the reason of so many senseless scholars in the world.
~William Penn

There are books so alive that you're always afraid that while you weren't reading, the book has gone and changed, has shifted like a river; while you went on living, it went on living too, and like a river moved on and moved away. No one has stepped twice into the same river. But did anyone ever step twice into the same book?
~Marina Tsvetaeva

After three days without reading, talk becomes flavorless.

~Chinese proverb

Always read stuff that will make you look good if you die in the middle of it.

~P. J. O'Rourke

A classic is a book which people praise and don't read.

~Mark Twain

Do not read good books--life is too short for that--read only the best.

~Ernest Dimnet

Do your bit to save humanity from lapsing back into barbarity by reading all the novels you can.

~Richard Hughes

Don't just read the easy stuff. You may entertained by it, but you will never grow from it.

~Jim Rohn

Each time we re-read a book we get more out of it because we put more into it; a different person is reading it, and therefore it is a different book.

~Murial Clark

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

~Aldous Huxley

For one who reads, there is no limit to the number of lives that may be lived, for fiction, biography, and history offer an inexhaustible number of lives in many parts of the world, in all periods of time.

~Louis L'Amour

The greatest gift is a passion for reading. It is cheap, it consoles, it distracts, it excites, it gives you knowledge of the world and experience of a wide kind. It is a moral illumination.

~Elizabeth Hardwick

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

~Anthony Trollope

How many a man has dated a new era in his life from the reading of a book!

~Henry David Thoreau

I have never known any distress that an hour's reading did not relieve.

~Charles Louis de Secondat, Baron de la Brede et de Montesquieu

I love to lose myself in other men's minds.

~Charles Lamb

If you believe everything you read, you better not read.

~Japanese proverb

If you wish to be a good reader--read.

~Epictetus

...it is very well worthwhile 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.

~Jane Austen

It's such a wonderful feeling to watch a child discover that reading is a marvelous adventure rather than a chore.

~Zilpha Keatley Snyder

The man who reads only for improvement is beyond the hope of much improvement before he begins.

~Jonathan Daniels

No entertainment is so cheap as reading, nor any pleasure so lasting.

~Lady Mary Wortley Montague

One must be an inventor to read well. ...there is then creative reading as well as creative writing.

~Ralph Waldo Emerson

Only one hour in the normal day is more pleasurable than the hours spent in bed with a book before going to sleep, and that is the hour spent in bed with a book after being called in the morning.

~Rose Macauley

The poet can only write the poems; it takes the reader to complete the meaning.

~Nikki Giovanni

The pleasure of all reading is doubled when one lives with another who shares the same books.

~Katherine Mansfield

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

Read an hour every day in your chosen field. This works out to about one book per week, 50 books per year, and will guarantee your success.

~Brian Tracey

Read at every wait; read at all hours; read within leisure; read in times of labor; read as one goes in; read as one goes out. The task of an educated mind is simply put: read to lead.

~Cicero

Read, every day, something no one else is reading. Think, every day, something no one else is thinking. Do, every day, something no one else would be silly enough to do. It is bad for the mind to be always part of unanimity.

~Christopher Morley

Reading furnishes the mind only with materials of knowledge; it is thinking that makes what we read ours.

~John Locke

Reading is an escape, an education, a delving into the brain of another human being on such an intimate level that every nuance of thought, every snapping of synapse, every slippery desire of the author is laid open before you like, well, a book.

~Cynthia Heimel

Reading is essential for those who seek to rise above the ordinary. We must not permit anything to stand between us and the book that could change our lives.

~Jim Rohn

Reading is to the mind what exercise is to the body. It is wholesome and bracing for the mind to have its faculties kept on the stretch.

~Ausustus Hare

Reading not only enlarges and challenges the mind; it also engages and exercises the brain. Today's youth who sits mesmerized by a television screen is not going to be tomorrow's leader. Television watching is passive. Reading is active.

~Richard M. Nixon

Seek the lofty by reading, hearing and seeing great work at some moment every day.

~Thornton Wilder

There are some people who read too much: The bibliobibuli. I know some who are constantly drunk on books, as others 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. Menchen

There is divine beauty in learning, just as there is human beauty in tolerance. To learn means to accept the postulate that life did not begin at my birth. Others have been here before me, and I walk in their footsteps. The books I have read were composed by generations of fathers and sons, mothers and daughters, teachers and disciples. I am the sum total of their experiences, their quests. And so are you.

~Elie Wiesel

This habit of reading ... is your pass to the most perfect pleasure that God has prepared for his creatures. It lasts when all other pleasures fade. It will make your hours pleasant to you as long as you live.

~Anthony Trollope

The time to read is any time: no apparatus, no appointment of time and place, is necessary. It is the only art which can be practiced at any hour of the day or night, whenever the time and inclination comes, that is your time for reading; in joy or sorrow, health or illness.

~ Holbrook Jackson

To read a writer is for me not merely to get an idea of what he says, but to go off with him, and travel in his company.

~Andre Gide

The reading of all good books is like conversation with the finest men of past centuries.

~Descartes

To sit alone in the lamplight with a book spread out before you, and hold intimate converse with men of unseen generations--such is a pleasure beyond compare.

~Kenko Yoshida

To talk in public, to think in solitude, to read and to hear, to inquire and answer inquiries, is the business of the scholar.

~Samuel Johnson

Today a reader--tomorrow a leader.