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

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