Reading - Quotes

'Tis the good reader that makes the good book; in every book he finds passages which seem confidences or asides hidden from all else and unmistakably meant for his ear; the profit of books is according to the sensibility of the reader; the profoundest thought or passion sleeps as in a mine, until it is discovered by an equal mind and heart. - Ralph Waldo Emerson

The habit of reading is the only one I know in which there is no alloy. It lasts when all other pleasures fade. It will be there to support you when all other resources are gone. It will be present to you when the energies of your body have fallen away from you. It will make your hours pleasant to you as long as you live. - Anthony Trollope

I suppose every old scholar has had the experience of reading something in a book which was significant to him, but which he could never find again. Sure he is that he read it there, but no one else ever read it, nor can he find it again, though he buy the book and ransack every page. - Ralph Waldo Emerson

Reading is essential for growth. It gives a whole dimension to our lives. It has been so since the first reading material was made available to the masses. It helps us to know and understand each other and our world better, to see beneath exteriors, to wipe out boundaries and distances. - Leo Buscaglia

The time to read is any time: no apparatus, no appointment of time and place, is necessary. It is the only art which can be practiced at any hour of the day or night, whenever the time and inclination comes, that is your time for reading; in joy or sorrow, health or illness. - Holbrook Jackson

In a real sense, people who have read good literature have lived more than people who cannot or will not read. It is not true that we have only one life to live; if we can read, we can live as many more lives and as many kinds of lives as we wish. - S. I. Hayakawa

Good literature continually read for pleasure must, let us hope, do some good to the reader: must quicken his perception though dull, and sharpen his discrimination though blunt, and mellow the rawness of his personal opinions. - A. E. Housman

Every man who knows how to read has it in his power to magnify himself, to multiply the ways in which he exists, to make his life full, significant and interesting. - Aldous Huxley

When the mind is braced by labor and invention, the page of whatever book we read becomes luminous with manifold allusion. Every sentence is doubly significant, and the sense of our author is as broad as the world. - Ralph Waldo Emerson

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. - William Faulkner

The greatest gift is a passion for reading. It is cheap, it consoles, it distracts, it excites, it gives you knowledge of the world and experience of a wide kind. It is a moral illumination. - Elizabeth Hardwick

Then I thought of reading - the nice and subtle happiness of reading ... this joy not dulled by age, this polite and unpunishable vice, this selfish, serene, lifelong intoxication. - Logan Pearsall Smith

Resolve to edge in a little reading every day, if it is but a single sentence. If you gain fifteen minutes a day, it will make itself felt at the end of the year. - Horace Mann

It is better to read one poem a hundred times and keep it in your heart, than to read a hundred poems and remember them not at all. - Unknown

Read not to contradict and confute, nor to believe and take for granted, nor to find talk and discourse, but to weigh and consider. - Francis Bacon

When you reread a classic, you do not see more in the book than you did before; you see more in you than there was before. - Cliff Fadiman

The man who does not read good books has no advantage over the man who cannot read them. - Mark Twain

To acquire the habit of reading is to construct for yourself a refuge from almost all the miseries of life. - William Somerset Maugham

The reading of all good books is like a conversation with the finest minds of past centuries. - Rene Descartes

To read a writer is for me not merely to get an idea of what he says, but to go off with him and travel in his company. - Andre Gide

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. - David Viscott

Books give not wisdom where none was before. But where some is, there reading makes it more. - Elizabeth Hardwick

In science, read, by preference, the newest works; in literature, the oldest. - Edward Bulwer-Lytton

I have never known any distress that an hour's reading did not relieve. - Charles De Montesquieu

Don't just read the easy stuff. You may be entertained by it, but you will never grow from it. - Jim Rohn

The one thing I regret is that I will never have time to read all the books I want to read. - Francoise Sagan

Reading is equivalent to thinking with someone else's head instead of with one's own. - Arthur Schopenhauer

I read my eyes out and can't read half enough. . . . The more one reads the more one sees we have to read. - John Adams

The mere brute pleasure of reading – the sort of pleasure a cow must have in grazing. - Lord Chesterfield

If you believe everything you read, you had better not read. - Unknown

Anyone who can read, can learn to read deeply and thus live more fully. - Norman Cousins

No one can read with profit that which he cannot learn to read with pleasure. - Thomas Hardy

It is well to read everything of something, and something of everything. - Joseph Brodsky

Reading without reflecting is like eating without digesting. - Edmund Burke

Read as you taste fruit or savor wine, or enjoy friendship, love or life. - George Herbert

One must be a wise reader to quote wisely and well. - Amos Bronson Alcott

Reading is to the mind what exercise is to the body. - Sir Richard Steele

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

No two persons ever read the same book. - Edmund Wilson

I am a part of everything that I have read. - John Kieran

Your library is your portrait. - Holbrook Jackson