370 quotes about Books - Reading



Show me the books he loves and I shall know the man far better than through mortal friends.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Reading is a basic tool in the living of a good life.
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That is a good book which is opened with expectation, and closed with delight and profit.
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Beware of the person of one book.
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I am not a speed reader. I am a speed understander.
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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.
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A real book is not one that we read, but one that reads us.
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Some books are undeservedly forgotten; none are undeservedly remembered.
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Everything in this book may be wrong. [The Savior's Manual]
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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.
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Some books are to be tasted; others to be swallowed; and some few to be chewed and digested.
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Read not to contradict and confute; nor to believe and take for granted; nor to find talk and discourse; but to weigh and consider.
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Footnotes are the finer-suckered surfaces that allow testicular paragraphs to hold fast to the wider reality of the library.
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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.
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He has only half learned the art of reading who has not added to it the more refined art of skipping and skimming.
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Books are men of higher stature; the only men that speak aloud for future times to hear.
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The printing press is either the greatest blessing or the greatest curse of modern times, sometimes one forgets which it is.
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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.
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The world may be full of fourth-rate writers but it's also full of fourth-rate readers.
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Hypocrite reader -- my fellow -- my brother!
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A book is a garden, an orchard, a storehouse, a party, a company by the way, a counselor, a multitude of counselors.
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Books are not made for furniture, but there is nothing else that so beautifully furnishes a house.
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Where is human nature so weak as in the bookstore?
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When I am dead, I hope it may be said: His sins were scarlet, but his books were read.
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Books are not men and yet they stay alive.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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I read the newspaper avidly. It is my one form of continuous fiction.
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Reading is not a duty, and has consequently no business to be made disagreeable.
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Read nothing that you do not care to remember, and remember nothing you do not mean to use.
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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.
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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.
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You don't have to burn books to destroy a culture. Just get people to stop reading them.
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There are worse crimes than burning books. One of them is not reading them.
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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.
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The lessons taught in great books are misleading. The commerce in life is rarely so simple and never so just.
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It is well to read everything of something, and something of everything.
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Begin to read a book that will help you move toward your dream.
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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!
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Books succeed, and lives fail.
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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.
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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.
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Reading without purpose is sauntering not exercise.
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In science read the newest works, in literature read the oldest.
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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.
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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.
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The oldest books are still only just out to those who have not read them.
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'Tis pleasant, sure, to see one's name in print; A book's a book, although there's nothing in it.
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The reading or non-reading a book will never keep down a single petticoat.
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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.
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A novel is never anything, but a philosophy put into images.
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A novel points out that the world consists entirely of exceptions.
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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.
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The best effect of any book, is that it excites the reader to self-activity.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Books are the blessed chloroform of the mind.
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Most books today seemed to have been written overnight from books read the day before.
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At least half the mystery novels published violate the law that the solution, once revealed, must seem to be inevitable.
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A good title is the title of a successful book.
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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.
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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.
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Every man is a volume if you know how to read him.
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The flood of print has turned reading into a process of gulping rather than savoring
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Let blockheads read what blockheads wrote.
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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.
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The mere brute pleasure of reading --the sort of pleasure a cow must have in grazing.
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A good novel tells us the truth about it's hero; but a bad novel tells us the truth about its author.
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A book is the only immortality.
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Happy is he who has laid up in his youth, and held fast in all fortune, a genuine and passionate love for reading.
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A room without books is like a body without a soul.
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