READING QUOTES IV
quotations about reading
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 danger of reading too much is that we shall have only the thoughts of others. The danger of reading too little or none at all, that we shall have none but our own.
LORD ACTON
attributed, Day's Collacon
You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read. It was books that taught me that the things that tormented me most were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive, or who had ever been alive.
JAMES BALDWIN
Life Magazine, May 24, 1963
To read without reflecting is like eating without digesting.
EDMUND BURKE
attributed, Day's Collacon
Finally, from so little sleeping and so much reading, his brain dried up and he went completely out of his mind.
MIGUEL DE CERVANTES
Don Quixote
The ability to read awoke inside of me some long dormant craving to be mentally alive.
MALCOLM X
The Autobiography of Malcolm X
But reading is not idleness ... it is the passive, receptive side of civilization without which the active and creative world would be meaningless. It is the immortal spirit of the dead realised within the bodies of the living. It is sacramental.
STEPHEN SPENDER
journal entry, January 4, 1980
In a polite age almost every person becomes a reader, and receives more instruction from the Press than the Pulpit.
OLIVER GOLDSMITH
The Citizen of the World
As addictions go, reading is among the cleanest, easiest to feed, happiest.
JOSEPH EPSTEIN
attributed, The Miracle of Language
Reading makes a full Man, Meditation a profound Man, Discourse a clear Man.
BENJAMIN FRANKLIN
Poor Richard's Almanac
Reading is sometimes an ingenious device for avoiding thought.
SIR ARTHUR HELPS
Friends in Council
A man ought to read just as inclination leads him; for what he reads as a task will do him little good.
SAMUEL JOHNSON
Boswell's Life of Johnson
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
By reading a man does, as it were, antidate his life, and makes himself contemporary with past ages.
J. COLLIER
attributed, Day's Collacon
Until I feared I would lose it, I never loved to read. One does not love breathing.
HARPER LEE
To Kill a Mockingbird
There are some who say that sitting at home reading is the equivalent of travel, because the experiences described in the book are more or less the same as the experiences one might have on a voyage, and there are those who say that there is no substitute for venturing out into the world. My own opinion is that it is best to travel extensively but to read the entire time, hardly glancing up to look out of the window of the airplane, train, or hired camel.
DANIEL HANDLER
as Lemony Snicket, Horseradish: Bitter Truths You Can't Avoid
Reading is the way out of ignorance, and the road to achievement.
BEN CARSON
Think Big
Reading furnishes the mind only with materials of knowledge; it is thinking that makes what we read ours.
JOHN LOCKE
A Treatise on the Conduct of the Understanding
Education ... has produced a vast population able to read but unable to distinguish what is worth reading.
G. M. TREVELYAN
English Social History
The more imagination the reader has ... the more he will do for himself. He will, at a mere hint from the author, flood wretched material with suggestion and never guess that he is himself chiefly making what he enjoys.
C. S. LEWIS
"On Stories", Of Other Worlds: Essays and Stories