Quotation About Reading V

The world of books is the most remarkable creation of man:
nothing else that he builds ever lasts monuments fall; nations perish;
civilization grow old and die out; new races build others.
But in the world of books are volumes that have seen
this happen again and again and yet live on.
Still young, still as fresh as the day they were written,
still telling men's hearts, of the hearts of men centuries dead.
~ Clarence Day



There is no Frigate like a Book
To take us Lands away,
Nor any Coursers like a Page
Of prancing Poetry.
~ Emily Dickinson


If I read a book that impresses me,
I have to take myself firmly in hand,
before I mix with other people;
otherwise they would think my
mind rather queer. ~ Anne Frank


The greatest gift is the 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


Never judge a book by its movie. ~ J. W. Eagan

There is more treasure in books than in all the pirate's loot on Treasure Island. ~ Walt Disney

It is a great thing to start life with a small number of really good books which are your very own.
~ Sir Arthur Conan Doyle


What's a book? Everything or nothing. The eye that sees it all. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson


A book is a fragile creature. It suffers the wear of time, it fears rodents, the elements, clumsy hands. ~ Umberto Eco


Don't join the book burners. Don't be afraid to go in your library and read every book. ~ Dwight D. Eisenhower


When I get a little money, I buy books; and if any is left, I buy food and clothes. ~ Desiderius Erasmus


Books are the quietest and most constant of friends; they are the most accessible and wisest of counselors, and the most patient of teachers. ~ Charles W. Eliot


The best of a book is not the thought which it contains, but the thought which it suggests;
just as the charm of music dwells not in the tones but in the echoes of our hearts.
~ Oliver Wendell Holmes

Be as careful of the books you read, as of the company you keep,
for your habits and character will be as much influenced by the former as the latter.
~ Paxton Hood


What a school thinks about its library is a measure of what it feels about education.
~ Harold Howe


The proper study of mankind is books. ~ Aldous Huxley

Quotation About Reading IV

I've traveled the world twice over,
Met the famous; saints and sinners,
Poets and artists, kings and queens,
Old stars and hopeful beginners,
I've been where no-one's been before,
Learned secrets from writers and cooks
All with one library ticket
To the wonderful world of books.



A good book is the best of friends, the same today and forever. ~ Martin Farquhar Tupper


My books are water; those of the great geniuses are wine -- everybody drinks water. ~ Mark Twain

The man who doesn't read good books has no advantage over the man who can't read them. ~ Mark Twain


The great American novel has not only already been written,
it has already been rejected. ~ Frank Dane


A novel is never anything, but a philosophy put into images. ~ Albert Camus


The closest we will ever come to an orderly universe is a good library. ~ Ashleigh Brilliant


I have always imagined that Paradise will be a kind of library. ~ Jorge Luis Borges


When we read a story, we inhabit it.
The covers of the book are like a roof and four walls.
What is to happen next will take place within the four walls of the story.
And this is possible because the story's voice makes everything its own. ~ John Berger


All the best stories in the world are but one story in reality -- the story of escape.
It is the only thing which interests us all and at all times, how to escape. ~ Arthur Christopher Benson


A truly great book should be read in youth,
again in maturity and once more in old age,
as a fine building should be seen by morning light,
at noon and by moonlight.
~ Robertson Davies


The way a book is read- which is to say,
the qualities a reader brings to a book-
can have as much to do with its worth
as anything the author puts into it. ~ Norman Cousins


The book salesman should be honored
because he brings to our attention, as a rule, the very
books we need most and neglect most. ~ Frank Crane


It was clear that the books owned the shop rather than the other
way about. Everywhere they had run wild and taken possession of
their habitat, breeding and multiplying and clearly lacking any strong
hand to keep them down. ~ Agatha Christie

Quotation About Books III

We get no good
By being ungenerous, even to a book,
And calculating profits,
-- so much help
By so much reading. it is rather when
We gloriously forget ourselves and plunge
Soul-forward, headlong, into a book's profound,
Impassioned for its beauty and salt of truth --
'T is then we get the right good from a book.
~ Elizabeth Barrett Browning


Books, not which afford us a cowering enjoyment,
but in which each thought is of unusual daring;
such as an idle man cannot read, and a timid one would not be
entertained by, which even make us dangerous to existing institution --
such call I good books.
~ Henry David Thoreau



The Brahmins say that in their books there are many
predictions of times in which it will rain.
But press those books as strongly as you can,
you can not get out of them a drop of water.
So you can not get out of all the books that contain
the best precepts the smallest good deed.
~ Count Leo Tolstoy


The power of a text is different when it is read from when it is copied out.
Only the copied text thus commands the soul of him who is occupied with it,
whereas the mere reader never discovers the new aspects
of his inner self that are opened by the text,
that road cut through the interior jungle forever
closing behind it: because the reader follows the movement
of his mind in the free flight of day-dreaming,
whereas the copier submits it to command.
~ Walter Benjamin


A conventional good read is usually a bad read,
a relaxing bath in what we know already.
A true good read is surely an act of innovative creation in which we,
the readers, become conspirators.
~ Malcolm Bradbury


Read not to contradict and confute; nor to believe and take for granted;
nor to find talk and discourse; but to weigh and consider.
Some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed,
and some few to be chewed and digested:
that is, some books are to be read only in parts,
others to be read, but not curiously, and some few
to be read wholly, and with diligence and attention.
~ Francis Bacon


Surviving and thriving as a professional today demands
two new approaches to the written word.
First, it requires a new approach to orchestrating information,
by skillfully choosing what to read and what to ignore.
Second, it requires a new approach to integrating information, by
reading faster and with greater comprehension.
~ Jimmy Calano


Readers may be divided into four classes:
1.) Sponges, who absorb all that they read and return it in
nearly the same state, only a little dirtied.
2.) Sand-glasses, who retain nothing and are content to get
through a book for the sake of getting through the time.
3.) Strain-bags, who retain merely the dregs of what they read.
4.) Mogul diamonds, equally rare and valuable, who profit by
what they read, and enable others to profit by it also.
~ Samuel Taylor Coleridge


There are books so alive that you're always afraid that
while you weren't reading, the book has gone and changed,
has shifted like a river; while you went on living, it went on living too,
and like a river moved on and moved away.
No one has stepped twice into the same river.
But did anyone ever step twice into the same book?
~ Marina Tsvetaeva


What I like best is a book that's at least funny once in a while...
What really knocks me out is a book that,
when you're all done reading it,
you wish the author that wrote it was a terrific friend of yours
and you could call him up on the phone whenever you felt like it.
That doesn't happen much, though.
~ J. D. Salinger


To use books rightly, is to go to them for help;
to appeal to them when our own knowledge and power fail;
to be led by them into wider sight and purer conception than our own,
and to receive from them the united sentence of the judges
and councils of all time, against our solitary and unstable opinions.
~ John Ruskin


The real risks for any artist are taken in pushing the work
to the limits of what is possible, in the attempt to increase the sum
of what it is possible to think. Books become good when they
go to this edge and risk falling over it --when they endanger
the artist by reason of what he has, or has not, artistically dared.
~ Salman Rushdie

Quotation About Books II

A good book is the purest essence of a human soul. ~ Thomas Carlyle





Books, books, books had found the secret of a garret-room
piled high with cases in my father's name;
Piled high, packed large, --where, creeping in and out
among the giant fossils of my past, like some small nimble mouse
between the ribs of a mastodon, I nibbled here and there
at this or that box, pulling through the gap, in heats
of terror, haste, victorious joy, the first book first.
And how I felt it beat under my pillow, in the morning's dark.
An hour before the sun would let me read!
My books!
~ Elizabeth Barrett Browning



A book is good company.
It is full of conversation without loquacity.
It comes to your longing with full instruction,
but pursues you never.
~ Henry Ward Beecher


That is a good book which is opened with expectation and closed in profit. ~ Amos Bronson Alcott


She is too fond of books, and it has turned her brain. ~ Louisa May Alcott



When we read a story, we inhabit it. The covers of the book are like a roof and four walls. What is to happen next will take place within the four walls of the story.
And this is possible because the story's voice makes everything its own. ~ John Berger


There is no past, so long as book shall live! ~Edward Bulwer-Lytton



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


Books are men of higher stature; the only men that speak aloud for future times to hear. ~ E.S. Barrett


Show me the books he loves and I shall know the man far better than through mortal friends. ~ Dawn Adams


I used to walk to school with my nose buried in a book. ~ Coolio


I often feel sorry for people who don't read good books; they are missing a chance to lead an extra life. ~ Scott Corbett


The oldest books are still only just out to those who have not read them. ~ Samuel Butler


In books lies the soul of the whole past time. ~ Thomas Carlyle


All that Mankind has done, thought, gained or been -- it is lying as in magic preservation in the pages of Books. ~ Thomas Carlyle


The best effect of any book is that it excites the reader to self activity. ~ Thomas Carlyle


Books are standing counselors and preachers, always at hand, and always disinterested; having this advantage over oral instructors, that they are ready to repeat their lesson as often as we please. ~ Oswald Chambers


After all manner of professors have done their best for us, the place we are to get knowledge is in books. The true university of these days is a collection of books. ~ Thomas Carlyle


Books are masters who instruct us without rods or ferules,
without words or anger, without bread or money.
If you approach them, they are not asleep; if you seek them,
they do not hide; if you blunder, they do not scold;
if you are ignorant, they do not laugh at you.
~ Richard De Bury


He that loves a book will never want a faithful friend,
a wholesome counselor, a cheerful companion, an effectual comforter.
By study, by reading, by thinking, one may innocently
divert and pleasantly entertain himself,
as in all weathers, as in all fortunes. ~ Barrow

Quotation About Books

People die, but books never die.


Beware of the man of one book. ~ Thomas Aquinas


There is no friend as loyal as a book. ~ Ernest Hemingway


Books are the legacies that a great genius leaves to mankind, which are delivered down from generation to generation as presents to the posterity of those who are yet unborn. ~ Joseph Addison


A book is like a garden carried in the pocket. ~ Chinese proverb


Books are the blessed chloroform of the mind. ~ Robert Chambers


A good title is the title of a successful book. ~ Raymond Chandler


Books are not made for furniture, but there is nothing else that so beautifully furnishes a house. ~ Henry Ward Beecher


A room without books is like a body without a soul. ~ Marcus T. Cicero


Everywhere I have sought rest and not found it, except sitting in a corner by myself with a little book. ~ Thomas Kempis


The man who is fond of books is usually a man of lofty thought, and of elevated opinions. ~ Christopher Dawson


Books, I found, had the power to make time stand still, retreat or fly into the future. ~ Jim Bishop


The failure to read good books both enfeebles the vision and strengthens our most fatal tendency -- the belief that the here and now is all there is. ~ Allan Bloom


A wonderful thing about a book, in contrast to a computer screen, is that you can take it to bed with you. ~ Daniel J. Boorstin


Books are not men and yet they stay alive. ~ Stephen Vincent Benet


A book is a garden, an orchard, a storehouse, a party, a company by the way, a counselor, a multitude of counselors. ~ Henry Ward Beecher


Books give not wisdom where none was before. But where some is, there reading makes it more. ~ John Harington

Quotation About Reading III

Learning to read has been reduced to a process of mastering
a series of narrow, specific, hierarchical skills.
Where armed-forces recruits learn the components of a rifle
or the intricacies of close order drill "by the numbers,"
recruits to reading learn its mechanics sound
by sound and word by word.
~ Jacquelyn Gross


It is no more necessary that a man should remember the different
dinners and suppers which have made him healthy, than the different
books which have made him wise. Let us see the results of good food
in a strong body, and the results of great reading in a full and powerful mind.
~ Sydney Smith


Reading is to the mind what exercise is to the body. ~ Richard Steele


Digressions, incontestably, are the sunshine; they are the life, the soul of reading. ~ Laurence Sterne


The illiterate of the 21st century will not be those who cannot read and write, but those who cannot learn, unlearn, and relearn. ~ Alvin Toffler


If we encounter a man of rare intellect, we should ask him what books he reads. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson


The successful Accelerated Reader is able to read larger than normal "blocks" or "bites" of the printed page with each eye stop. He has accepted, without reservation, the philosophy that
the most important benefit of reading is the gaining of information, ideas, mental "picture" and entertainment -- not the fretting over words. He has come to the realization that words
in and of themselves are for the most part insignificant. ~ Wade E. Cutler


Our high respect for a well read person is praise enough for literature. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson


Tis the good reader that makes the good book; a good head cannot read amiss: in every book he finds passages which seem confidences or asides hidden from all else and unmistakably meant for his ear. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson


I suggest that the only books that influence us are those for which we are ready,
and which have gone a little farther down our particular path than we have yet got ourselves. ~ E. M. Forster


Fiction reveals truth that reality obscures. ~ Jessamyn West


The person who deserves most pity is a lonesome one
on a rainy day who doesn't know how to read. ~ Benjamin Franklin


Fiction is like a spider's web, attached ever so lightly perhaps, but still attached to life at all four corners. ~ Virginia Woolf


Choose an author as you choose a friend. ~ Sir Christopher Wren


When I discovered libraries, it was like having Christmas every day. ~ Jean Fritz


I was born with the impression that what happened in books was much more reasonable, and interesting, and real, in some ways, than what happened in life. ~ Anne Tyler


No matter how busy you may think you are, you must find time for reading, or surrender yourself to self-chosen ignorance. ~ Atwood H. Townsend


Education... has produced a vast population able to read but unable to distinguish what is worth reading, an easy prey to sensations and cheap appeals. ~ G. M. Trevelyan

Quotation About Reading II

To feel most beautifully alive means to be reading something beautiful, ready always to apprehend in the flow of language the sudden flash of poetry. ~ Gaston Bachelard


Reading is not a duty, and has consequently no business to be made disagreeable. ~ Augustine Birrell


Force yourself to reflect on what you read, paragraph by paragraph. ~ Samuel Taylor Coleridge


Only a generation of readers will span a generation of writers. ~ Steven Spielberg


People say that life is the thing, but I prefer reading. ~ Logan Pearsall Smith


When I look back, I am so impressed again with the life-giving power of literature.
If I were a young person today, trying to gain a sense of myself in the world, I would do that again by reading, just as I did when I was young. ~ Maya Angelou


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. Then write. If it's good, you'll find out. If it's not, throw it out of the window. ~ William Faulkner


When we read a story, we inhabit it. The covers of the book are like a roof and four walls. What is to happen next will take place within the four walls of the story.
And this is possible because the story's voice makes everything its own. ~ John Berger


It is well to read everything of something, and something of everything. ~ Lord Henry P. Brougham


There is creative reading as well as creative writing. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson


Children are made readers on the laps of their parents. ~ Emilie Buchwald


To read without reflecting is like eating without digesting. ~ Edmund Burke


Happy is he who has laid up in his youth, and held fast in all fortune, a genuine and passionate love of reading. ~ Rufus Choate


Perhaps there are none more lazy, or more truly ignorant, than your everlasting readers. ~ William Cobbett


You are wise, witty and wonderful, but you spend too much time reading this sort of stuff. ~ Jim Critchfield


Reading, after a certain age, diverts the mind too much from its creative pursuits. Any man who reads too much and uses his own brain too little falls into lazy habits of thinking. ~ Albert Einstein



Reading furnishes the mind only with materials for knowledge; it is thinking that makes what we read ours. ~ John Locke


Reading makes immigrants of us all. It takes us away from home, but more important, it finds homes for us everywhere. ~ Hazel Rochman

Quotation About Reading I

Read in order to live. ~ Gustave Flaubert


Reading is a basic tool in the living of a good life. ~ Mortimer J. Adler


Learn as much by writing as by reading. ~ Lord Acton


Today a reader, tomorrow a leader. ~ W. Fusselman


Reading is to the mind what exercise is to the body. ~ Joseph Addison


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


Once we have learned to read, meaning of words can somehow register without consciousness. ~ Anthony Marcel


How can you dare teach a man to read until you've taught him everything else first? ~ George Bernard Shaw


Until I feared I would lose it, I never loved to read. One does not love breathing. ~ Harper Lee



Readers are plentiful: thinkers are rare. ~ Harriet Martineau


Read as you taste fruit or savor wine, or enjoy friendship, love or life. ~ Holbrook Jackson


I am not a speed reader. I am a speed understander. ~ Isaac Asimov


There is an art of reading, as well as an art of thinking, and an art of writing. ~ Isaac Disraeli


Reading maketh a full man, conference a ready man, and writing an exact man. ~ Francis Bacon


People say that life is the thing, but I prefer reading. ~ Logan Pearsall Smith


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


You don't have to burn books to destroy a culture. Just get people to stop reading them. ~ Ray Bradbury


The pleasure of reading is doubled when one lives with another who shares the same books. ~ Katherine Mansfield


It is well to read everything of something, and something of everything. ~ Lord Henry P. Brougham


I read the newspaper avidly. It is my one form of continuous fiction. ~ Aneurin Bevan


The world may be full of fourth-rate writers but it's also full of fourth-rate readers. ~ Stan Barstow

Quotation About Books & Reading

Wear the old coat and buy the new book. ~ Austin Phelps


We shouldn't teach great books; we should teach a love of reading. ~ B. F. Skinner


A great book should leave you with many experiences and slightly exhausted at the end.
You should live several lives while reading it. ~ William Styron


Everything in the world exists to end up in a book. ~ Stephane Mallarme


Outside a dog, a book is man's best friend. Inside a dog, it's too dark to read. ~ Groucho Marx



Books are the treasured wealth of the world and the fit inheritance of generations and nations.
~ Henry David Thoreau


One half who graduate from college never read another book.
~ Herbert True


To sit alone in the lamplight with a book spread out before you,
and hold intimate converse with men of unseen generations--
such is a pleasure beyond compare. ~ Yosida Kenko


The books that help you most are those which make you think that most.
The hardest way of learning is that of easy reading;
but a great book that comes from a great thinker is a ship of
thought, deep freighted with truth and beauty.
~ Theodore Parker


It is not enough to simply teach children to read;
we have to give them something worth reading.
Something that will stretch their imaginations-
something that will help them make sense of their own lives
and encourage them to reach out toward people
whose lives are quite different from their own.
~ Katherine Paterson


Upon books the collective education of the race depends;
they are the sole instruments of registering,
perpetuating and transmitting thought.
~ Henry C. Rogers

Everything you need for better future and success has already been written. And guess what?
All you have to do is go to the library. ~ Jim Rohn


The reason that fiction is more interesting than any other form of literature,
to those who really like to study people, is that in fiction the author can really tell the truth without humiliating himself. ~ Eleanor Roosevelt


All books are divisible into two classes, the books of the hour, and the books of all time.
~ John Ruskin


A library is thought in cold storage. ~ Herbert Samuel


The more that you read,
the more things you will know.
The more that you learn,
the more places you'll go.
~ Dr. Seuss

More Quotes

• Quotation About Reading IV
• Quotation About Books III
• Quotation About Books II
• Quotation About Books
• Quotation About Reading III
• Quotation About Reading II
• Quotation About Reading I