quotations about reading
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
Reading is the way out of ignorance, and the road to achievement.
BEN CARSON
Think Big
People say that life is the thing, but I prefer reading.
LOGAN PEARSALL SMITH
Afterthoughts
Trying to determine what is going on in the world by reading newspapers is like trying to tell the time by watching the second hand of a clock.
BEN HECHT
attributed, Jewish Wit and Wisdom
Reading makes a full Man, Meditation a profound Man, Discourse a clear Man.
BENJAMIN FRANKLIN
Poor Richard's Almanac
Read to live, not live to read.
EDWARD BULWER-LYTTON
The Caxtons
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
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
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
By reading we acquaint ourselves in a very extensive manner with the affairs, actions, and thoughts of the living and the dead, in the most remote nations and in the most distant ages; and that with as much ease as though they lived in our own age and nation.
ISAAC WATTS
The Improvement of the Mind
There is more treasure in books than in all the pirates' loot on Treasure Island ... and best of all, you can enjoy these riches every day of your life.
WALT DISNEY
attributed, The Miracle of Language
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
It may be well to wait a century for a reader, as God has waited six thousand years for an observer.
JOHANNES KEPLER
attributed, The Martyrs of Science
By reading a man does, as it were, antidate his life, and makes himself contemporary with past ages.
J. COLLIER
attributed, Day's Collacon
As addictions go, reading is among the cleanest, easiest to feed, happiest.
JOSEPH EPSTEIN
attributed, The Miracle of Language
A peasant that reads is a prince in waiting.
WALTER MOSLEY
The Long Fall
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
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
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
There are worse crimes than burning books. One of them is not reading them.
JOSEPH BRODSKY
Independent on Sunday, May 19, 1991