Reading Quotes

Despite the enormous quantity of books, how few people read! And if one reads profitably, one would realize how much stupid stuff the vulgar herd is content to swallow every day.

Voltaire

How well he's read, to reason against reading!

William Shakespeare

We, as we read, must become Greeks, Romans, Turks, priest and king, martyr and executioner; must fasten these images to some reality in our secret experience, or we shall learn nothing rightly.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

The true reader reads every work seriously in the sense that he reads it whole-heartedly, makes himself as receptive as he can. But for that very reason he cannot possibly read every work solemly or gravely. For he will read 'in the same spirit that the author writ.'... He will never commit the error of trying to munch whipped cream as if it were venison.

C.S. Lewis

The most valuable thing in my wallet is my library card.

Michael Lipsey

To read too many books is harmful.

Mao Zedong

I am not a speed reader. I am a speed understander.

Isaac Asimov

A book is like a man - clever and dull, brave and cowardly, beautiful and ugly. For every flowering thought there will be a page like a wet and mangy mongrel, and for every looping flight a tap on the wing and a reminder that wax cannot hold the feathers firm too near the sun.

John Steinbeck

Perhaps these pages are more particularly addressed to poor students. As for the rest of my readers, they will accept such portions as apply to them. I trust that none will stretch the seams in putting on the coat, for it may do good service to him whom it fits.

Henry David Thoreau

A fondness for reading, properly directed, must be an education in itself.

Jane Austen

In science, read by preference the newest works. In literature, read the oldest. The classics are always modern.

Lord Edward Lytton

Come to the book as you would come to an unexplored land. Come without a map. Explore it and draw your own map.

Stephen King

There are two motives for reading a book: one, that you enjoy it; the other, that you can boast about it.

Bertrand Russell

Everything in this book may be wrong. The Savior's Manual

Richard Bach

In the dark colony of night, when I consider man's magnificent capacity for malice, madness, folly, envy, rage, and destructiveness, and I wonder whether we shall not end up as breakfast for newts and polyps, I seem to hear the muffled cries of all the words in all the books with covers closed.

Leo Rosten

Prerequisite for rereadability in books: that they be forgettable.

Jean Rostand

The books one has written in the past have two surprises in store: one couldn't write them again, and wouldn't want to.

Jean Rostand

A book is a garden, an orchard, a storehouse, a party, a company by the way, a counselor, a multitude of counselors.

Henry Ward Beecher

Books are not made for furniture, but there is nothing else that so beautifully furnishes a house.

Henry Ward Beecher

I suggest that the only books that influence us are those for which we are ready, and which have gone a little further down our particular path than we have gone ourselves.

E. M. Forster