Browse through our collection of quotes tagged with Reading.
There are two kinds of books. Those that no one reads and those that no one ought to read.
H. L. Mencken
Who are you, reader, reading my poems an hundred years hence?I cannot send you one single flower from this wealth of the spring, one single streak of gold from yonder clouds.Open your doors and look abroad.From your blossoming garden gather fragrant memories of the vanished flowers of an hundred years before.In the joy of your heart may you feel the living joy that sang one spring morning, sending its glad voice across a hundred years.
Rabindranath Tagore, The Gardene
An ordinary man can surround himself with two thousand books and thenceforward have at least one place in the world in which it is possible to be happy.
Augustine Birrell
You don't have to burn books to destroy a culture. Just get people to stop reading them.
Ray Bradbury, "Reader's Digest",
Books, I found, had the power to make time stand still, retreat or fly into the future.
Jim Bishop, A Bishop's Confessio
The books that everybody admires are those that nobody reads.
Anatole France
The printing press is either the greatest blessing or the greatest curse of modern times, sometimes one forgets which it is.
James Barrie
They go too far because they do not reflect what personality is. Just as words have two functions - information and creation - so each human mind has two personalities, one on the surface, one deeper down. The upper personality has a name. . . . It is conscious and alert, it does things like dining out, answering letters, etc., and it differs vividly and amusingly from other personalities. The lower personality is a very queer affair. In many ways it is a perfect fool, but without it there is no literature, because unless a man dips a bucket down into it occasionally he cannot produce first-class work. There is something general about it. Although it is inside S. T. Coleridge, it cannot be labelled with his name. It has something in common with all other deeper personalities, and the mystic will assert that the common quality is God, and that here, in the obscure recesses of our being, we near the gates of the Divine. It is in any case the force that makes for anonymity. As it came from the depths, so it soars to the heights, out of local questionings; as it is general to all men, so the works it inspires have something general about them, namely beauty. The poet wrote the poem no doubt, but he forgot himself while he wrote it, and we forget him while we read. What is so wonderful about great literature is that it transforms the man who reads it towards the condition of the man who wrote, and brings to birth in us also the creative impulse. Lost in the beauty where he was lost, we find more than we ever threw away, we reach what seems to be our spiritual home, and remember that it was not the speaker who was in the beginning but the Word.
E. M. Forster, Anonymity: an Enq
A wicked book cannot repent.
Proverb
There are mystically in our faces certain characters which carry in them the motto of our souls, wherein he that cannot read A, B, C may read our natures.
Sir Thomas Browne
With Shakespeare and poetry, a new world was born. New dreams, new desires, a self consciousness was born. I desired to know to know myself in terms of the new standards set by these books.
Peter Henry Abrahams, Tell Freed
A book burrows into your life in a very profound way because the experience of reading is not passive.
Erica Jong
The mere brute pleasure of reading --the sort of pleasure a cow must have in grazing.
G. K. Chesterton
No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader.
Robert Frost
I would sooner read a timetable or a catalog than nothing at all.
W. Somerset Maugham
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
I read part of it all the way through.
Samuel Goldwyn
The great American novel has not only already been written, it has already been rejected.
Frank Dane
I'm referred to, I see, as 'the biggest banker in modern publishing'. Now there's a line that needed the celebrated Guardian proof-reading.
Terry Pratchett
I bet if you look at the average teenager and the average adult, the average teenager has read more books in the last year than the average adult. Now of course the adult would be all like, 'I'm busy, I got a job, I got stuff to do.' WHATEVER! READ! I mean, you're watching CSI: Miami. Why would you be watching CSI: Miami, when you could be READING CSI: Miami, the novelization?
John Green
