Reading Quotes

Early in the morning, at break of day, in all the freshness and dawn of one's strength, to read a book --I call that vicious!

Friedrich Nietzsche

A classic is something that everybody wants to have read and nobody wants to read.

Mark Twain

If I had my way books would not be written in English, but in an exceedingly difficult secret language that only skilled professional readers and story-tellers could interpret. Then people like you would have to go to public halls and pay good prices to hear the professionals decode and read the books aloud for you. This plan would have the advantage of scaring off all amateur authors, retired politicians, country doctors and I-Married-a-Midget writers who would not have the patience to learn the secret language.

Robertson Davies

A book is not only a friend, it makes friends for you. When you have possessed a book with mind and spirit, you are enriched. But when you pass it on you are enriched threefold.

Henry Miller, The Books In My Li

Buy good books, and read them; the best books are the commonest, and the last editions are always the best, if the editors are not blockheads.

Lord Chesterfield

Let blockheads read what blockheads wrote.

Lord Chesterfield

She read with an eagerness which hardly left her power of comprehension, and from impatience of knowing what the next sentence might bring, was incapable of attending to the sense of the one before her eyes.

Jane Austen

Reading furnishes the mind only with material for knowledge; it is thinking that makes what we read ours.

John Locke

What one means by integrity, in the case of the novelist, is the conviction that he gives one that this is the truth. . . . When one so exposes it [integrity] and sees it come to life one exclaims in rapture, But this is what I have always felt and known and desired! And one boils over with excitement, and, shutting the book even with a kind of reverence as if it were something very precious, a stand-by to return to as long as one lives, one puts it back on the shelf.

Virginia Woolf