Reading Quotes

It is far better to be silent than merely to increase the quantity of bad books.

Voltaire (FrançoisMarie Arouet)

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

Voltaire (FrançoisMarie Arouet)

Books succeed, and lives fail.

Elizabeth Barrett Browning

Books, books, books had found the secret of a garret-room piled high with cases in my father's name; Piled high, packed large, --where, creeping in and out among the giant fossils of my past, like some small nimble mouse between the ribs of a mastodon, I nibbled here and there at this or that box, pulling through the gap, in heats of terror, haste, victorious joy, the first book first. And how I felt it beat under my pillow, in the morning's dark. An hour before the sun would let me read! My books!

Elizabeth Barrett Browning

It skims in through the eye, and by means of the utterly delicate retina hurls shadows like insect legs inward for translation. Then an immense space opens up in silence and an endlessly fecund sub-universe the writer descends, and asks the reader to descend after him, not merely to gain instructions but also to experience delight, the delight of mind freed from matter and exultant in the strength it has stolen from matter.

John Updike

I am a part of everything that I have read.

John Kieran

With one day's reading a man may have the key in his hands.

Ezra Pound

No man understands a deep book until he has seen and lived at least part of its contents.

Ezra Pound

Then I though of reading -- the nice and subtle happiness of reading ... this joy not dulled by age, this polite and unpunishable vice, this selfish, serene, lifelong intoxication.

Logan Pearsall Smith

A multitude of books distracts the mind.

Socrates

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

Of all the diversions of life, there is none so proper to fill up its empty spaces as the reading of useful and entertaining authors.

Joseph Addison

Books should to one of these fours ends conduce, for wisdom, piety, delight, or use.

Sir John Denham

I read the newspaper avidly. It is my one form of continuous fiction.

Aneurin Bevan

A novel must be exceptionally good to live as long as the average cat.

Hugh Maclennan

A novel is a mirror carried along a main road.

Henri B. Stendhal

What is important is not to be able to read rapidly, but to be able to decide what not to read.

James T. Mccay

Footnotes are the finer-suckered surfaces that allow testicular paragraphs to hold fast to the wider reality of the library.

Nicholson Baker

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

The chief knowledge that a man gets from reading books is the knowledge that very few of them are worth reading.

H. L. Mencken