quotations about reading
Multifarious reading weakens the mind like smoking, and is an excuse for its lying dormant.
F. W. ROBERTSON
attributed, Day's Collacon
I will read anything rather than work.
JEAN KERR
introduction, Please Don't Eat the Daisies
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.
JOSEPH ADDISON
The Spectator, June 18, 1711
Much reading has brought upon us a learned barbarism.
GEORG CHRISTOPH LICHTENBERG
"Notebook F", Aphorisms
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
As addictions go, reading is among the cleanest, easiest to feed, happiest.
JOSEPH EPSTEIN
attributed, The Miracle of Language
Much reading, like a too great repletion, stops up, through a course of diverse sometimes contrary opinions, the access of a nearer, newer, and quicker invention of your own.
LAUGHTON OSBORN
attributed, Day's Collacon
But reading is not idleness ... it is the passive, receptive side of civilization without which the active and creative world would be meaningless. It is the immortal spirit of the dead realised within the bodies of the living. It is sacramental.
STEPHEN SPENDER
journal entry, January 4, 1980
Learn to read slow; all other graces
Will follow in their proper places.
WILLIAM WALKER
Art of Reading
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
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
Sound and healthy reading will develop and enkindle the soul, enlighten the mind, and vivify and direct the imagination.
LOUISE SWANTON BELLOC
attributed, Day's Collacon
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
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
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
People say that life is the thing, but I prefer reading.
LOGAN PEARSALL SMITH
Afterthoughts
Love of reading enables a man to exchange the wearisome hours of life which come to every one, for hours of delight.
MONTESQUIEU
attributed, Day's Collacon
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