Quotes about books-reading

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

— Dawn Adams

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

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

In the case of good books, the point is not how many of them you can get through, but rather how many can get through to you.

— Mortimer J. Adler

Reading is a basic tool in the living of a good life.

— Mortimer J. Adler

That is a good book which is opened with expectation, and closed with delight and profit.

— Amos Bronson Alcott

Beware of the person of one book.

— St. Thomas Aquinas

I am not a speed reader. I am a speed understander.

— Isaac Asimov

He had read much, if one considers his long life; but his contemplation was much more than his reading. He was wont to say that if he had read as much as other men he should have known no more than other men.

— John Aubrey

A real book is not one that we read, but one that reads us.

— W. H. Auden

Some books are undeservedly forgotten; none are undeservedly remembered.

— W. H. Auden

Everything in this book may be wrong. [The Savior's Manual]

— Richard Bach

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

Read not to contradict and confute; nor to believe and take for granted; nor to find talk and discourse; but to weigh and consider.

— Francis Bacon

Footnotes are the finer-suckered surfaces that allow testicular paragraphs to hold fast to the wider reality of the library.

— Nicholson Baker

When the book comes out it may hurt you -- but in order for me to do it, it had to hurt me first. I can only tell you about yourself as much as I can face about myself.

— James Baldwin

He has only half learned the art of reading who has not added to it the more refined art of skipping and skimming.

— Arthur James Balfour

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

— E.S. Barrett

The printing press is either the greatest blessing or the greatest curse of modern times, sometimes one forgets which it is.

— Sir James M. Barrie

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

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

— Stan Barstow

Hypocrite reader -- my fellow -- my brother!

— Charles Baudelaire

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 are not made for furniture, but there is nothing else that so beautifully furnishes a house.

— Henry Ward Beecher

Where is human nature so weak as in the bookstore?

— Henry Ward Beecher

When I am dead, I hope it may be said: His sins were scarlet, but his books were read.

— Hilaire Belloc

Books are not men and yet they stay alive.

— Stephen Vincent Benet

Of all the ways of acquiring books, writing them oneself is regarded as the most praiseworthy method. Writers are really people who write books not because they are poor, but because they are dissatisfied with the books which they could buy but do not like.

— Walter Benjamin

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

Does there, I wonder, exist a being who has read all, or approximately all, that the person of average culture is supposed to have read, and that not to have read is a social sin? If such a being does exist, surely he is an old, a very old man.

— Arnold Bennett

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

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

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

— Aneurin Bevan

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

— Augustine Birrell

Read nothing that you do not care to remember, and remember nothing you do not mean to use.

— Professor Blackie

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 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

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

— Ray Bradbury

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

— Joseph Brodsky

A book may be compared to your neighbor: if it be good, it cannot last too long; if bad, you cannot get rid of it too early.

— Rupert Brooke

The lessons taught in great books are misleading. The commerce in life is rarely so simple and never so just.

— Anita Brookner

It is well to read everything of something, and something of everything.

— Lord Henry P. Brougham

Begin to read a book that will help you move toward your dream.

— Les Brown

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

Books succeed, and lives fail.

— Elizabeth Barrett Browning

When a book raises your spirit, and inspires you with noble and manly thoughts, seek for no other test of its excellence. It is good, and made by a good workman.

— Jean De La Bruyere

Read Homer once, and you can read no more. For all books else appear so mean, and so poor. Verse will seem prose; but still persist to read, and Homer will be all the books you need.

— Duke of Buckingham

Reading without purpose is sauntering not exercise.

— Edward G. Bulwer-Lytton

In science read the newest works, in literature read the oldest.

— Edward G. Bulwer-Lytton

Americans will listen, but they do not care to read. War and Peace must wait for the leisure of retirement, which never really comes: meanwhile it helps to furnish the living room. Blockbusting fiction is bought as furniture. Unread, it maintains its value. Read, it looks like money wasted. Cunningly, Americans know that books contain a person, and they want the person, not the book.

— Anthony Burgess

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

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

— Samuel Butler

Tis pleasant, sure, to see one's name in print; A book's a book, although there's nothing in it.

— Lord Byron

The reading or non-reading a book will never keep down a single petticoat.

— Lord Byron

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

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

— Albert Camus

A novel points out that the world consists entirely of exceptions.

— Joyce Carey

What we become depends on what we read after all the professors have finished with us. The greatest university of all is the collection of books.

— Thomas Carlyle

The best effect of any book, is that it excites the reader to self-activity.

— Thomas Carlyle

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

If a book comes from the heart it will contrive to reach other hearts. All art and author craft are of small account to that.

— Thomas Carlyle

Reading a book is like re-writing it for yourself. You bring to a novel, anything you read, all your experience of the world. You bring your history and you read it in your own terms.

— Angela Carter

The novel can't compete with cars, the movies, television, and liquor. A guy who's had a good feed and tanked up on good wine gives his old lady a kiss after supper and his day is over. Finished.

— Louis-Ferdinand Celine

A good book, in the language of the book-sellers, is a salable one; in that of the curious, a scarce one; in that of men of sense, a useful and instructive one.

— Oswald Chambers

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

Books are the blessed chloroform of the mind.

— Robert Chambers

Most books today seemed to have been written overnight from books read the day before.

— Sebastien-Roch Nicolas De Chamfort

At least half the mystery novels published violate the law that the solution, once revealed, must seem to be inevitable.

— Raymond Chandler

A good title is the title of a successful book.

— Raymond Chandler

It is chiefly through books that we enjoy intercourse with superior minds, and these invaluable means of communication are in the reach of all. In the best books, great men talk to us, give us their most precious thoughts, and pour their souls into ours.

— William Ellery Channing

God be thanked for books; they are the voices of the distant and the dead, and make us heirs of the spiritual life of past ages.

— William Ellery Channing

Every man is a volume if you know how to read him.

— William Ellery Channing

The flood of print has turned reading into a process of gulping rather than savoring

— Warren Chappell

Let blockheads read what blockheads wrote.

— Lord Chesterfield

Buy good books, and read them; the best books are the commonest, and the last editions are always the best, if the editors are not blockheads.

— Lord Chesterfield

The mere brute pleasure of reading --the sort of pleasure a cow must have in grazing.

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

A good novel tells us the truth about its hero; but a bad novel tells us the truth about its author.

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

A book is the only immortality.

— Rufus Choate

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

— Rufus Choate

A room without books is like a body without a soul.

— Marcus T. Cicero

Many books require no thought from those who read them, and for a very simple reason: they made no such demand upon those who wrote them. Those works, therefore, are the most valuable, that set our thinking faculties in the fullest operation. understand them.

— Clarendon

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

— William Cobbett

Books are but waste paper unless we spend in action the wisdom we get from thought -- asleep. When we are weary of the living, we may repair to the dead, who have nothing of peevishness, pride, or design in their conversation.

— Jeremy Collier

Next to acquiring good friends, the best acquisition is that of good books.

— Charles Caleb Colton

Books, like friends, should be few and well chosen. Like friends, too, we should return to them again and again for, like true friends, they will never fail us -- never cease to instruct -- never cloy.

— Charles Caleb Colton

A person of mature years and ripe development, who is expecting nothing from literature but the corroboration and renewal of past ideas, may find satisfaction in a lucidity so complete as to occasion no imaginative excitement, but young and ambitious students are not content with it. They seek the excitement because they are capable of the growth that it accompanies.

— Charles Horton Cooley

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

— Coolio

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

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

— Jim Critchfield

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

A good book is the very essence of a good man. His virtues survive in it, while the foibles and faults of his actual life are forgotten. All the goodly company of the excellent and great sit around my table, or look down on me from yonder shelves, waiting patiently to answer my questions and enrich me with their wisdom. A precious book is a foretaste of immortality.

— Theodore L. Cuyler

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

— Frank Dane

Next, in importance to books are their titles.

— Paul Davies

If I had my way books would not be written in English, but in an exceedingly difficult secret language that only skilled professional readers and story-tellers could interpret. Then people like you would have to go to public halls and pay good prices to hear the professionals decode and read the books aloud for you. This plan would have the advantage of scaring off all amateur authors, retired politicians, country doctors and I-Married-a-Midget writers who would not have the patience to learn the secret language.

— Robertson Davies

I heard his library burned down and both books were destroyed -- and one of them hadn't even been colored in yet.

— John Dawkins

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

— Christopher Dawson

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

Books should to one of these four ends conduce, For wisdom, piety, delight, or use

— Sir John Denham

The reading of all good books is like a conversation with all the finest men of past centuries.

— Rene Descartes

There are books of which the backs and covers are by far the best parts.

— Charles Dickens