READING QUOTES IV

quotations about reading

Reading quote

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

Tags: Montesquieu


Education ... has produced a vast population able to read but unable to distinguish what is worth reading.

G. M. TREVELYAN

English Social History

Tags: G. M. Trevelyan


Multifarious reading weakens the mind like smoking, and is an excuse for its lying dormant.

F. W. ROBERTSON

attributed, Day's Collacon


Today a reader, tomorrow a leader.

W. FUSSELLMAN

"Slogans for a Library", The Library, April 1926


Reading was my escape and my comfort, my consolation, my stimulant of choice: reading for the pure pleasure of it, for the beautiful stillness that surrounds you when you hear an author's words reverberating in your head.

PAUL AUSTER

The Brooklyn Follies


The ability to read awoke inside of me some long dormant craving to be mentally alive.

MALCOLM X

The Autobiography of Malcolm X

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Sometimes, you read a book and it fills you with this weird evangelical zeal, and you become convinced that the shattered world will never be put back together unless and until all living humans read the book.

JOHN GREEN

The Fault in Our Stars

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I will read anything rather than work.

JEAN KERR

introduction, Please Don't Eat the Daisies

Tags: Jean Kerr


Too much reading and too much meditation may produce the effect of a lamp inverted, which is extinguished by the excess of the oil, whose office it is to feed it.

GEORGE SEATON BOWES

Illustrative Gatherings for Preachers and Teachers


Learn to read slow; all other graces
Will follow in their proper places.

WILLIAM WALKER

Art of Reading


I tend to believe that computers are drawing kids -- and adults -- away from reading purely because they provide an alternative, vast source of spare-time amusement and entertainment. I recently heard a frightening statistic: there are less than one million true readers in this country (those who read every day instead of one book per year on a beach). Terrifying.

TIM LEBBON

interview, Infinity Plus

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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


When we read, we are not looking for new ideas, but to see our own thoughts given the seal of confirmation on the printed page. The words that strike us are those that awake an echo in a zone we have already made our own--the place where we live--and the vibration enables us to find fresh starting points within ourselves.

CESARE PAVESE

This Business of Living

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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

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Reading is sometimes an ingenious device for avoiding thought.

SIR ARTHUR HELPS

Friends in Council

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If we encountered a man of rare intellect, we should ask him what books he read.

RALPH WALDO EMERSON

Letters and Social Aims

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Accurate reading on a wide range of subjects makes the scholar; careful selection of the better makes the saint.

JOHN OF SALISBURY

The Statesman's Book of John of Salisbury


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

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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

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Reading makes a full Man, Meditation a profound Man, Discourse a clear Man.

BENJAMIN FRANKLIN

Poor Richard's Almanac

Tags: Benjamin Franklin