READING QUOTES III
quotations about reading
Do not read, as children do, to amuse yourself, or like the ambitious, for the purpose of instruction. No, read in order to live.
GUSTAVE FLAUBERT
letter to Mlle de Chantepie, June 1857
Reading gives us someplace to go when we have to stay where we are.
ANONYMOUS
Finally, from so little sleeping and so much reading, his brain dried up and he went completely out of his mind.
MIGUEL DE CERVANTES
Don Quixote
Education ... has produced a vast population able to read but unable to distinguish what is worth reading.
G. M. TREVELYAN
English Social History
Let us read, and let us dance; these two amusements will never do any harm to the world.
VOLTAIRE
A Philosophical Dictionary
Reading is a mere makeshift for original thinking.
ARTHUR SCHOPENHAUER
"On Thinking for Oneself", Parerga und Paralipomena
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
Thou art the cause, O reader, of my dwelling on lighter topics, when I would rather handle serious ones.
MARTIAL
Epigrams
People read everything nowadays, except books.
MADAME SWETCHINE
attributed, Day's Collacon
To read without reflecting is like eating without digesting.
EDMUND BURKE
attributed, Day's Collacon
Too much reading and too much meditation may produce the effect of a lamp inverted, which is extinguished by the excess of the oil, whose office it is to feed it.
GEORGE SEATON BOWES
Illustrative Gatherings for Preachers and Teachers
Reading a book is a dangerous thing, Justine. A book can make you find room in yourself for something you never thought you'd understand. Or worse, something you never wanted to understand.
GLEN DUNCAN
By Blood We Live
The ability to read awoke inside of me some long dormant craving to be mentally alive.
MALCOLM X
The Autobiography of Malcolm X
Accurate reading on a wide range of subjects makes the scholar; careful selection of the better makes the saint.
JOHN OF SALISBURY
The Statesman's Book of John of Salisbury
The danger of reading too much is that we shall have only the thoughts of others. The danger of reading too little or none at all, that we shall have none but our own.
LORD ACTON
attributed, Day's Collacon
The second I learned to read in first grade, when I was 5, I preferred it to life. And I still do.
FRAN LEBOWITZ
"In Conversation: Fran Lebowitz with Phong Bui", The Brooklyn Rail, March 4, 2014
I read my eyes out and can't read half enough.... The more one reads the more one sees we have to read.
JOHN ADAMS
letter to Abigail Adams, December 28, 1794
While we read a novel, we are insane--bonkers. We believe in the existence of people who aren't there, we hear their voices, we watch the battle of Borodino with them, we may even become Napoleon. Sanity returns (in most cases) when the book is closed.
URSULA K. LE GUIN
The Language of the Night: Essays on Fantasy and Science Fiction
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 is the way out of ignorance, and the road to achievement.
BEN CARSON
Think Big