Reading without purpose is sauntering, not exercise. More is got from one book on which the thought settles for a definite end in knowledge, than from libraries skimmed over by a wandering eye. A cottage flower gives honey to the bee, a king’s garden none to the butterfly.
—Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton (1803–73) British Novelist, Poet, Politician
Reading is equivalent to thinking with someone else’s head instead of with one’s own.
—Arthur Schopenhauer (1788–1860) German Philosopher
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 (1806–61) English Poet
Reading the Scriptures is an uplifting experience.
—Indian Proverb
A book is a mirror: If an ass peers into it, you can’t expect an apostle to look out.
—Georg Christoph Lichtenberg (1742–99) German Philosopher, Physicist
There is an art of reading, as well as an art of thinking, and an art of writing.
—Isaac D’Israeli (1766–1848) English Writer, Scholar
Reading makes immigrants of us all. It takes us away from home, but more important, it finds homes for us everywhere.
—Jean Rhys (1890–1979) British Novelist, Short-story Writer
Dead counsellors are the most instructive, because they are heard with patience and reverence.
—Samuel Johnson (1709–84) British Essayist
Books are the carriers of civilization. Without books, history is silent, literature dumb, science crippled, thought and speculation at a standstill. They are engines of change, windows on the world, lighthouses erected in the sea of time.
—Edwin Percy Whipple (1819–86) American Literary Critic
A room without books is like a body without a soul.
—Cicero (106BCE–43BCE) Roman Philosopher, Orator, Politician, Lawyer
If a secret history of books could be written, and the author’s private thoughts and meanings noted down alongside of his story, how many insipid volumes would become interesting, and dull tales excite the reader!
—William Makepeace Thackeray (1811–63) English Novelist
Who ever converses among old books will be hard to please among the new.
—William Temple (1881–1944) English Theologian, Archbishop
Literature is not exhaustible, for the sufficient and simple reason that a single book is not. A book is not an isolated entity: it is a narration, an axis of innumerable narrations. One literature differs from another, either before or after it, not so much because of the text as for the manner in which it is read.
—Jorge Luis Borges (1899–1986) Argentine Writer, Essayist, Poet
Remarks are not literature.
—Gertrude Stein (1874–1946) American Writer
How many a man has dated a new era in his life from the reading of a book! The book exists for us, perchance, that will explain our miracles and reveal new ones. The at present unutterable things we may find somewhere uttered.
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–62) American Philosopher
The principle of procrastinated rape is said to be the ruling one in all the great bestsellers.
—V. S. Pritchett (1900–97) British Biographer, Memoirist, Short Story Writer, Critic
The oldest books are still only just out to those who have not read them.
—Samuel Butler
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 (1908–97) Polish-born American Humorist, Screenwriter, Writer
All of the insights that we might ever need have already been captured by others in books. The important question is this: In the last ninety days, with this treasure of information that could change our lives, our fortunes, our relationships, our health, our children and our careers for the better, how many books have we read?
—Jim Rohn (1930–2009) American Entrepreneur, Author, Motivational Speaker
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 (1901–66) American Entrepreneur
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 (1780–1842) American Unitarian Theologian, Poet
Books are good enough in their own way, but they are a mighty bloodless substitute for life.
—Robert Louis Stevenson (1850–94) Scottish Novelist
Books are but waste paper unless we spend in action the wisdom we get from thought.
—Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton (1803–73) British Novelist, Poet, Politician
One sheds one’s sicknesses in books—repeats and presents again one’s emotions, to be master of them.
—D. H. Lawrence (1885–1930) English Novelist, Playwright, Poet, Essayist, Critic
The printing press is either the greatest blessing or the greatest curse of modern times, sometimes one forgets which it is.
—J. M. Barrie (1860–1937) Scottish Novelist, Dramatist
He ate and drank the precious Words, his Spirit grew robust; He knew no more that he was poor, nor that his frame was Dust.
—Emily Dickinson (1830–86) American Poet
I don’t think any good book is based on factual experience. Bad books are about things the writer already knew before he wrote them.
—Carlos Fuentes (1928–2012) Mexican Novelist, Diplomat
Master books, but do not let them master you.—Read to live, not live to read.
—Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton (1803–73) British Novelist, Poet, Politician
My only objection to the custom of giving books as Christmas presents is perhaps the selfish one that it encourages and keeps in the game a number of writers who would be far better employed if they abandoned the pen and took to work.
—P. G. Wodehouse (1881–1975) British Novelist, Short-story Writer, Playwright
What is reading, but silent conversation.
—Walter Savage Landor (1775–1864) English Writer, Poet
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