quotations about reading
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
Reading furnishes the mind only with materials of knowledge; it is thinking that makes what we read ours.
JOHN LOCKE
A Treatise on the Conduct of the Understanding
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
Reading gives us someplace to go when we have to stay where we are.
ANONYMOUS
The more imagination the reader has ... the more he will do for himself. He will, at a mere hint from the author, flood wretched material with suggestion and never guess that he is himself chiefly making what he enjoys.
C. S. LEWIS
"On Stories", Of Other Worlds: Essays and Stories
Read to live, not live to read.
EDWARD BULWER-LYTTON
The Caxtons
A book is a gift you can open again and again.
GARRISON KEILLOR
attributed, The Miracle of Language
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
If we encountered a man of rare intellect, we should ask him what books he read.
RALPH WALDO EMERSON
Letters and Social Aims
To read is to enter an intercourse with a text.
VARUN BEGLEY
"The Unbearable Freud"
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
One can read all one wants, and spend eternities in front of a blackboard with a tutor, but one is not going to learn to swim until one gets in the water.
DAVID MAMET
True and False
The sagacious reader who is capable of reading between these lines what does not stand written in them, but is nevertheless implied, will be able to form some conception.
JOHANN WOLFGANG VON GOETHE
Autobiography
Sometimes, you read a book and it fills you with this weird evangelical zeal, and you become convinced that the shattered world will never be put back together unless and until all living humans read the book.
JOHN GREEN
The Fault in Our Stars
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
You don't have to burn books to destroy a culture. Just get people to stop reading them.
RAY BRADBURY
attributed, Book Savvy
A good reader is nearly as rare as a good writer. People bring their prejudices, whether friendly or adverse. They are lamp and spectacles, lighting and magnifying the page.
ROBERT ELDRIDGE ARIS WILLMOTT
Pleasures, Objects and Advantages of Literature
We have not read an author till we have seen his object, whatever it may be, as he saw it.
THOMAS CARLYLE
Essays
Writing and reading decrease our sense of isolation. They deepen and widen and expand our sense of life: they feed the soul. When writers make us shake our heads with the exactness of their prose and their truths, and even make us laugh about ourselves or life, our buoyancy is restored. We are given a shot at dancing with, or at least clapping along with, the absurdity of life, instead of being squashed by it over and over again. It's like singing on a boat during a terrible storm at sea. You can't stop the raging storm, but singing can change the hearts and spirits of the people who are together on that ship.
ANNE LAMOTT
Bird by Bird
I love to lose myself in other men's minds.
CHARLES LAMB
"Detached Thoughts on Books and Reading", Last Essays of Elia