READING QUOTES V

quotations about 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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I love to lose myself in other men's minds.

CHARLES LAMB

"Detached Thoughts on Books and Reading", Last Essays of Elia

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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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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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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

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Reading is sometimes an ingenious device for avoiding thought.

SIR ARTHUR HELPS

Friends in Council

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People say that life is the thing, but I prefer reading.

LOGAN PEARSALL SMITH

Afterthoughts

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

BENJAMIN FRANKLIN

Poor Richard's Almanac

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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

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As addictions go, reading is among the cleanest, easiest to feed, happiest.

JOSEPH EPSTEIN

attributed, The Miracle of Language

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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

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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


From the moment I picked up your book until I put it down, I was convulsed with laughter. Some day I intend reading it.

GROUCHO MARX

letter to S. J. Perelman

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Read to live, not live to read.

EDWARD BULWER-LYTTON

The Caxtons

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There are worse crimes than burning books. One of them is not reading them.

JOSEPH BRODSKY

Independent on Sunday, May 19, 1991


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

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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

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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