Quotes about books-reading

After all, the world is not a stage -- not to me: nor a theatre: nor a show-house of any sort. And art, especially novels, are not little theatres where the reader sits aloft and watches... and sighs, commiserates, condones and smiles. That's what you want a book to be: because it leaves you so safe and superior, with your two-dollar ticket to the show. And that's what my books are not and never will be. Whoever reads me will be in the thick of the scrimmage, and if he doesn't like it -- if he wants a safe seat in the audience -- let him read someone else.

— D. H. Lawrence

One sheds one's sicknesses in books -- repeats and presents again one's emotions, to be master of them.

— D. H. Lawrence

I can't bear art that you can walk round and admire. A book should be either a bandit or a rebel or a man in the crowd.

— D. H. Lawrence

The classics are only primitive literature. They belong to the same class as primitive machinery and primitive music and primitive medicine.

— Stephen B. Leacock

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

— Harper Lee

You've really got to start hitting the books because it's no joke out here.

— Spike Lee

For a good book has this quality, that it is not merely a petrifaction of its author, but that once it has been tossed behind, like Deucalion's little stone, it acquires a separate and vivid life of its own.

— Caroline Lejeune

I feel like I'm drowning. Every night, I'm carrying home loads of things to read but I'm too exhausted. I keep clipping things and Xeroxing them and planning to read them eventually, but I just end up throwing it all away and feeling guilty.

— Ghita Levine

There are very many people who read simply to prevent themselves from thinking.

— Georg C. Lichtenberg

Do we write books so that they shall merely be read? Don't we also write them for employment in the household? For one that is read from start to finish, thousands are leafed through, other thousands lie motionless, others are jammed against mouseholes, thrown at rats, others are stood on, sat on, drummed on, have gingerbread baked on them or are used to light pipes.

— Georg C. Lichtenberg

A vacuum of ideas affects people differently than a vacuum of air, otherwise readers of books would be constantly collapsing.

— Georg C. Lichtenberg

A book is a mirror: If an ass peers into it, you can't expect an apostle to look out.

— Georg C. Lichtenberg

The things I want to know are in books; my best friend is the man who'll get me a book I ain't read.

— Abraham Lincoln

Reading furnishes the mind only with material for knowledge; it is thinking that makes what we read ours.

— John Locke

I feel a kind of reverence for the first books of young authors. There is so much aspiration in them, so much audacious hope and trembling fear, so much of the heart's history, that all errors and shortcomings are for a while lost sight of in the amiable self assertion of youth.

— Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Many readers judge of the power of a book by the shock it gives their feelings --as some savage tribes determine the power of muskets by their recoil; that being considered best which fairly prostrates the purchaser.

— Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

All books are either dreams or swords.

— Amy Lowell

For books are more than books, they are the life, the very heart and core of ages past, the reason why men lived and worked and died, the essence and quintessence of their lives.

— Amy Lowell

Books are the bees which carry the quickening pollen from one to another mind.

— James Russell Lowell

What a sense of security in an old book which time has criticized for us.

— James Russell Lowell

The multitude of books is a great evil. There is no limit to this fever for writing.

— Martin Luther

In science, read by preference the newest works. In literature, read the oldest. The classics are always modern.

— Lord Edward Lytton

A novel must be exceptionally good to live as long as the average cat.

— Hugh Maclennan

Everything in the world exists to end up in a book.

— Stephane Mallarme

A house without books is like a room without windows. No man has a right to bring up his children without surrounding them with books, if he has the means to buy them. It is a wrong to his family. Children learn to read by being in the presence of books. The love of knowledge comes with reading and grows upon it. And the love of knowledge, in a young mind, is almost always a warrant against the inferior excitement of passions and vices.

— Horace Mann

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

— Katherine Mansfield

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

— Anthony Marcel

Readers are plentiful: thinkers are rare.

— Harriet Martineau

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

— Groucho Marx

I would sooner read a timetable or a catalog than nothing at all.

— W. Somerset Maugham

What is important is not to be able to read rapidly, but to be able to decide what not to read.

— James T. Mccay

The book to read is not the one which thinks for you, but the one which makes you think. No book in the world equals the Bible for that.

— Mccosh

Any book that helps a child to form a habit of reading, to make reading one of his deep and continuing needs, is good for him.

— Richard McKenna

A successful book cannot afford to be more than ten percent new.

— Marshall Mcluhan

The chief knowledge that a man gets from reading books is the knowledge that very few of them are worth reading.

— H. L. Mencken

There are two kinds of books. Those that no one reads and those that no one ought to read.

— H. L. Mencken

There are people who read too much: bibliobibuli. I know some who are constantly drunk on books, as other men are drunk on whiskey or religion. They wander through this most diverting and stimulating of worlds in a haze, seeing nothing and hearing nothing.

— H. L. Mencken

A person who publishes a book appears willfully in public with his pants down.

— Edna St. Vincent Millay

This is not a book. This is libel, slander, defamation of character. This is not a book, in the ordinary sense of the word. No, this is a prolonged insult, a gob of spit in the face of Art, a kick in the pants to God, Man, Destiny, Time, Love, Beauty... what you will. I am going to sing for you, a little off key perhaps, but I will sing.

— Henry Miller

Until it is kindled by a spirit as flamingly alive as the one which gave it birth a book is dead to us. Words divested of their magic are but dead hieroglyphs.

— Henry Miller

A book is a part of life, a manifestation of life, just as much as a tree or a horse or a star. It obeys its own rhythms, its own laws, whether it be a novel, a play, or a diary. The deep, hidden rhythm of life is always there -- that of the pulse, the heart beat.

— Henry Miller

All my good reading, you might say, was done in the toilet. There are passages in Ulysses which can be read only in the toilet -- if one wants to extract the full flavor of their content.

— Henry Miller

Deep versed in books and shallow in himself.

— John Milton

A good book is the precious life-blood of the master spirit, embalmed and treasured up on purpose for a life beyond.

— John Milton

For books are not absolutely dead things, but do contain a potency of life in them to be as active as that soul was whose progeny they are; nay, they do preserve as in a vial the purest efficacy and extraction of that living intellect that bred them. I know they are as lively, and as vigorously productive, as those fabulous dragon's teeth; and being sown up and down, may chance to spring up armed men.

— John Milton

Who kills a man kills a reasonable creature, God's image, but thee who destroys a good book, kills reason itself.

— John Milton

Books are not absolutely dead things, but do contain a certain potency of life in them, to be as active as the soul whose progeny they are; they preserve, as in a vial, the purest efficacy and extraction of the living intellect that bred them.

— John Milton

No entertainment is so cheap as reading, nor is any pleasure so lasting.

— Lady Mary Wortley Montagu

Every abridgement of a good book is a fool abridged.

— Michel Eyquem De Montaigne

The constant habit of perusing devout books is so indispensable, that it has been termed the oil of the lamp of prayer. Too much reading, however, and too little meditation, may produce the effect of a lamp inverted; which is extinguished by the very excess of that ailment, whose property is to feed it.

— Hannah More

You will find most books worth reading are worth reading twice.

— John Morely

Some of the most famous books are the least worth reading. Their fame was due to their having done something that needed to be doing in their day. The work is done and the virtue of the book has expired.

— John Morely

A dose of poison can do its work but once. A bad book can go on poisoning minds for generations.

— William Murray

A bibliophile of little means is likely to suffer often. Books don't slip from his hands but fly past him through the air, high as birds, high as prices.

— Pablo Neruda

The worst readers are those who behave like plundering troops: they take away a few things they can use, dirty and confound the remainder, and revile the whole.

— Friedrich Nietzsche

Early in the morning, at break of day, in all the freshness and dawn of one's strength, to read a book --I call that vicious!

— Friedrich Nietzsche

Read good, big important things.

— Peggy Noonan

The books one reads in childhood, and perhaps most of all the bad and good bad books, create in one's mind a sort of false map of the world, a series of fabulous countries into which one can retreat at odd moments throughout the rest of life, and which in some cases can survive a visit to the real countries which they are supposed to represent.

— George Orwell

This book is not to be tossed lightly aside, but to be hurled with great force.

— Dorothy Parker

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

The last thing one discovers in composing a work is what to put first.

— Blaise Pascal

Much reading is an oppression of the mind, and extinguishes the natural candle, which is the reason of so many senseless scholars in the world.

— William Penn

Five daily newspapers arrive in my California driveway. The New York times and the Wall Street Journal are supplemented by three local papers. As for magazines, I read, or at least skim, Business Week, Forbes, The Economist, INC; Industry Week, Fortune. Other subscriptions include Sales and Marketing Management, Modern Health Care, Progressive Grocer, High Tech Business, and Slaon Management Review from MIT. I religiously read Business Tokyo, Asia Week, and Far Eastern Economic Review. I glance at Newsweek and Time ... but I devour the New Republic, Policy Review, Foreign Affairs, The Washington Monthly, and Public Interest. How about books? A dozen or more each month.

— Thomas J. Peters

I divide all readers into two classes: those who read to remember and those who read to forget.

— William Lyon Phelps

What gunpowder did for war the printing press has done for the mind.

— Wendell Phillips

No one can read with profit that which he cannot learn to read with pleasure.

— Noah Porter

Properly, we should read for power. Man reading should be man intensely alive. The book should be a ball of light in one's hand.

— Ezra Pound

No man understands a deep book until he has seen and lived at least part of its contents.

— Ezra Pound

With one day's reading a man may have the key in his hands.

— Ezra Pound

A wicked book cannot repent.

— Proverb

The more sins you confess, the more books you will sell.

— American Proverb

There is no robber worse than a bad book.

— Italian Proverb

This book fills a much-needed gap.

— Hadas In A Review.

She could give herself up to the written word as naturally as a good dancer to music or a fine swimmer to water. The only difficulty was that after finishing the last sentence she was left with a feeling at once hollow and uncomfortably full. Exactly like indigestion.

— Jean Rhys

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

— Hazel Rochman

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

— Henry C. Rogers

The book you don't read won't help.

— Jim Rohn

Miss a meal if you have to, but don't miss a book.

— Jim Rohn

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

Don't just read the easy stuff. You may be entertained by it, but you will never grow from it.

— 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

Very young children eat their books, literally devouring their contents. This is one reason for the scarcity of first editions of Alice in Wonderland and other favorites of the nursery.

— A. S. W. Rosenbach

Prerequisite for rereadability in books: that they be forgettable.

— Jean Rostand

The books one has written in the past have two surprises in store: one couldn't write them again, and wouldn't want to.

— Jean Rostand

In the dark colony of night, when I consider man's magnificent capacity for malice, madness, folly, envy, rage, and destructiveness, and I wonder whether we shall not end up as breakfast for newts and polyps, I seem to hear the muffled cries of all the words in all the books with covers closed.

— Leo Rosten

A book is a version of the world. If you do not like it, ignore it; or offer your own version in return.

— Salman Rushdie

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

A book worth reading is worth buying.

— John Ruskin

You should read books like you take medicine, by advice, and not by advertisement.

— John Ruskin

Be sure that you go to the author to get at his meaning, not to find yours.

— John Ruskin

Books are divided into two classes, the books of the hour and the books of all time.

— John Ruskin

How long most people would look at the best book before they would give the price of a large turbot for it?

— John Ruskin

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

A library is thought in cold storage.

— Herbert Samuel

I am what libraries and librarians have made me, with little assistance from a professor of Greek and poets.

— B. K. Sandwell

Without books the development of civilization would have been impossible. They are the engines of change, windows on the world, Lighthouses as the poet said erected in the sea of time. They are companions, teachers, magicians, bankers of the treasures of the mind, Books are humanity in print.

— Arthur Schopenhauer

To buy books would be a good thing if we also could buy the time to read them.

— Arthur Schopenhauer

Reading is equivalent to thinking with someone else's head instead of with one's own.

— Arthur Schopenhauer

Buying books would be a good thing if one could also buy the time to read them in: but as a rule the purchase of books is mistaken for the appropriation of their contents.

— Arthur Schopenhauer

Books are like a mirror. If an ass looks in, you can't expect an angel to look out.

— Arthur Schopenhauer