quotations about reading
To read merely for reading's sake is almost as unprofitable as not reading at all. Setting out, in the first place with a clear idea of what we wish to learn, which is eminently important, we must afterwards, if we would realize what we have read, reperuse it in thought. This only makes it truly our own.
LEO HARTLEY GRINDON
Life: Its Nature, Varieties, and Phenomena
Reading is sometimes an ingenious device for avoiding thought.
SIR ARTHUR HELPS
Friends in Council
By reading a man does, as it were, antidate his life, and makes himself contemporary with past ages.
J. COLLIER
attributed, Day's Collacon
If we were more careful not to teach our children to read in their childhood we should not be so anxious about the effects of pernicious literature upon their adolescent morals.
JOHN KENDRICK BANGS
The Autobiography of Methuselah
The first time I read an excellent book, it is to me just as if I had gained a new friend. When I read over a book I have perused before, it resembles the meeting with an old one.
OLIVER GOLDSMITH
The Citizen of the World
A peasant that reads is a prince in waiting.
WALTER MOSLEY
The Long Fall
The best moments in reading are when you come across something -- a thought, a feeling, a way of looking at things -- which you had thought special and particular to you. Now here it is, set down by someone else, a person you have never met, someone even who is long dead. And it is as if a hand has come out and taken yours.
ALAN BENNETT
The History Boys
You should read only when your own thoughts dry up, which will of course happen frequently enough even to the best heads; but to banish your own thoughts so as to take up a book is a sin against the holy ghost; it is like deserting untrammeled nature to look at a herbarium or engravings of landscapes.
ARTHUR SCHOPENHAUER
"On Thinking for Oneself", Parerga und Paralipomena
Read to live, not live to read.
EDWARD BULWER-LYTTON
The Caxtons
Of all the diversions of life, there is none so proper to fill up its empty spaces as the reading of useful and entertaining authors.
JOSEPH ADDISON
The Spectator, June 18, 1711
People say that life is the thing, but I prefer reading.
LOGAN PEARSALL SMITH
Afterthoughts
Love of reading enables a man to exchange the wearisome hours of life which come to every one, for hours of delight.
MONTESQUIEU
attributed, Day's Collacon
The whole point of straws, I had thought, was that you did not have to set down the slice of pizza to suck a dose of Coke while reading a paperback.
NICHOLSON BAKER
The Mezzanine
Do not Books still accomplish miracles, as Runes were fabled to do? They persuade men. Not the wretchedest circulating library novel, which foolish girls thumb and con in remote villages, but will help to regulate the actual practical weddings and households of those foolish girls.
THOMAS CARLYLE
On Heroes, Hero-worship, & the Heroic in History: Six Lectures
By reading we acquaint ourselves in a very extensive manner with the affairs, actions, and thoughts of the living and the dead, in the most remote nations and in the most distant ages; and that with as much ease as though they lived in our own age and nation.
ISAAC WATTS
The Improvement of the Mind
What I look for most in the books I read is a sense of consciousness. It's so I know that I've lived. At the end, I can say, "Yes, I have been here--I was here, and I was paying attention."
LILI TAYLOR
O Magazine, August 2006
Reading makes a full Man, Meditation a profound Man, Discourse a clear Man.
BENJAMIN FRANKLIN
Poor Richard's Almanac
There are worse crimes than burning books. One of them is not reading them.
JOSEPH BRODSKY
Independent on Sunday, May 19, 1991
As addictions go, reading is among the cleanest, easiest to feed, happiest.
JOSEPH EPSTEIN
attributed, The Miracle of Language
No entertainment is so cheap as reading, nor any pleasure so lasting.
LADY W. M. MONTAGUE
attributed, Day's Collacon