Reading Quotes

It is books that teach us to refine our pleasures when young, and to recall them with satisfaction when we are old.

Leigh Hunt

I had plenty of pimples as a kid. One day I fell asleep in the library. When I woke up, a blind man was reading my face.

Rodney Dangerfield

The good of a book lies in its being read. A book is made up of signs that speak of other signs, which in their turn speak of things. Without an eye to read them, a book contains signs that produce no concepts; therefore it is dumb.

Umberto Eco

Perhaps there are none more lazy, or more truly ignorant, than your everlasting readers.

William Cobbett

I am, when you stop to think of it, a member of a fairly select group: the final handful of American novelists who learned to read and write before they learned to eat a daily helping of video bullshit.

Stephen King

Read in order to live.

Gustave Flaubert

It is only a novel... or, in short, only some work in which the greatest powers of the mind are displayed, in which the most thorough knowledge of human nature, the happiest delineation of its varieties, the liveliest effusions of wit and humour, are conveyed to the world in the best-chosen language

Jane Austen

When you have mastered numbers, you will in fact no longer be reading numbers, any more than you read words when reading books You will be reading meanings.

Harold S. Geneen

Most books today seemed to have been written overnight from books read the day before.

Sebastian Roch Nicolas Chamfort

It was Trout's fantasy that somebody would be outraged by the footprints. This would give him the opportunity to reply grandly, What is it that offends you so? I am simply using man's first printing press. You are reading a bold and universal headline which says,'I am here, I am here, I am here.

Kurt Vonnegut

Books are standing counselors and preachers, always at hand, and always disinterested; having this advantage over oral instructors, that they are ready to repeat their lesson as often as we please.

Oswald Chambers

So long as ignorance and misery remain on earth, books like this cannot be useless.

Victor Hugo

Learning to read has been reduced to a process of mastering a series of narrow, specific, hierarchical skills. Where armed-forces recruits learn the components of a rifle or the intricacies of close order drill by the numbers, recruits to reading learn its mechanics sound by sound and word by word.

Jacquelyn Gross

Reading is a basic tool in the living of a good life.

Mortimer J. Adler

In the case of good books, the point is not how many of them you can get through, but rather how many can get through to you.

Mortimer J. Adler

There was a time when the world acted on books; now books act on the world.

Joseph Joubert

The worst thing about new books is that they keep us from reading the old ones.

Joseph Joubert

I am reading six books at once, the only way of reading; since, as you will agree, one book is only a single unaccompanied note, and to get the full sound, one needs ten others at the same time.

Virginia Woolf

If on the other hand we found even one reader to whom the cheap little book with its double columns and the lurid daub on its cover had been a lifelong delight, who had read and reread it, who would notice, and object, if a single word were changed, then, however little we could see in it ourselves and however it was despised by our friends and colleagues, we should not date to put it beyond the pale.

C.S. Lewis

It is from books that wise people derive consolation in the troubles of life.

Victor Hugo