Browse through our collection of quotes tagged with Reading.
There is a set of religious, or rather moral, writings which teach that virtue is the certain road to happiness, and vice to misery in this world. A very wholesome and comfortable doctrine, and to which we have but one objection, namely, that it is not true.
Henry Fielding
He had dropped upon a seat halfway down the nave and, again in the museum mood, was trying with head thrown back and eyes aloft, to reconstitute a past, to reduce it in fact to the convenient terms of Victor Hugo, whom, a few days before, giving the rein for once in a way to the joy of life, he had purchased in seventy bound volumes, a miracle of cheapness, parted with, he was assured by the shopman, at the price of the red-and-gold alone. He looked, doubtless, while he played his eternal nippers over Gothic glooms, sufficiently rapt in reverence; but what his thought had finally bumped against was the question of where, among packed accumulations, so multiform a wedge would be able to enter..
Henry James, The Ambassadors, 19
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.
Sir Richard Steele
Very young children eat their books, literally devouring their contents. This is one reason for the scarcity of first editions of Alice in Wonderland and other favorites of the nursery.
A. S. W. Rosenbach
A great book should leave you with many experiences and slightly exhausted at the end. You should live several lives while reading it.
William Styron
You are wise, witty and wonderful, but you spend too much time reading this sort of stuff.
Jim Critchfield
The books we think we ought to read are poky, dull, and dry; The books that we would like to read we are ashamed to buy; The books that people talk about we never can recall; And the books that people give us, oh, they're the worst of all.
Carolyn Wells
Books must be read as deliberately and reservedly as they were written.
Henry David Thoreau
How many a man has dated a new era in his life from the reading of a book! The book exists for us, perchance, that will explain our miracles and reveal new ones. The at present unutterable things we may find somewhere uttered.
Books, not which afford us a cowering enjoyment, but in which each thought is of unusual daring; such as an idle man cannot read, and a timid one would not be entertained by, which even make us dangerous to existing institution --such call I good books.
Read the best books first, or you may not have a chance to read them at all.
O, let my books be then the eloquence and dumb presages of my speaking breast.
William Shakespeare
Most books, like their authors, are born to die; of only a few books can it be said that death has no dominion over them; they live, and their influence lives forever.
J. Swartz
Somewhere, everywhere, now hidden, now apparent in what ever is written down, is the form of a human being. If we seek to know him, are we idly occupied?
Virginia Woolf
There is no such thing as a functional illiterate.
Kelvin Throop III
The lessons taught in great books are misleading. The commerce in life is rarely so simple and never so just.
Anita Brookner
A book may be compared to your neighbor: if it be good, it cannot last too long; if bad, you cannot get rid of it too early.
Rupert Brooke
The tools I need for my work are paper, tobacco, food, and a little whiskey.
William Faulkner
Read, read, read. Read everything-- trash, classics, good and bad, and see how they do it. Just like a carpenter who works as an apprentice and studies the master. Read! You'll absorb it. Then write. If it is good, you'll find out. If it's not, throw it out the window.
The worst readers are those who behave like plundering troops: they take away a few things they can use, dirty and confound the remainder, and revile the whole.
Friedrich Nietzsche
