Reading
- The ability to read awoke inside me some long dormant craving to be mentally alive.--Malcolm X (The Autobiography of Malcolm X)
- After three days without reading, talk becomes flavorless.--Chinese proverb
- Always read stuff that will make you look good if you die in the middle of it.--P. J. O'Rourke
- Babies are born with the instinct to speak, the way spiders are born with the instinct to spin webs. You don't need to train babies to speak; they just do. But reading is different.--Steven Pinker
- Book Week brings us together to talk about books and reading and, out of our knowledge and love of books, to put the cause of children's reading squarely before the whole community and, community by community, across the whole nation. For a great nation is a reading nation.--Frederic Melcher
- Children are made readers on the laps of their parents.--Emilie Buchwald
- A classic is a book which people praise and don't read.--Mark Twain
- Do not read good books--life is too short for that--read only the best.--Ernest Dimnet
- Do your bit to save humanity from lapsing back into barbarity by reading all the novels you can.--Richard Hughes
- Don't just read the easy stuff. You may entertained by it, but you will never grow from it.--Jim Rohn (Jim Rohn's Weekly E-zine - January 27, 2004)
- Each time we re-read a book we get more out of it because we put more into it; a different person is reading it, and therefore it is a different book.--Murial Clark
- Every person who knows how to read has it in their power to magnify themselves, to multiply the ways in which they exist, to make life full, significant, and interesting.--Aldous Huxley
- The first lesson reading teaches is how to be alone.--Jonathan Franzen
- For one who reads, there is no limit to the number of lives that may be lived, for fiction, biography, and history offer an inexhaustible number of lives in many parts of the world, in all periods of time.--Louis L'Amour (Education of a Wandering Man)
- The greatest gift is a passion for reading. It is cheap, it consoles, it distracts, it excites, it gives you knowledge of the world and experience of a wide kind. It is a moral illumination.--Elizabeth Hardwick
- The habit of reading is the only enjoyment in which there is no alloy; it lasts when all other pleasures fade.--Anthony Trollope
- How many a man has dated a new era in his life from the reading of a book!--Henry David Thoreau (Walden)
- I always had my nose stuck in a book, a history book mostly. Of course, the main reason you read a book is to get a better insight into the people you're talking to. There were about three thousand books in the library downtown, and I guess I read them all, including the encyclopedias. I'm embarrassed to say that I remembered what I read, too.--Harry S. Truman
- I have always been a reader. I have read at every stage of my life, and there has never been a time when reading was not my greatest joy.--Diane Setterfield (The Thirteenth Tale)
- I have never known any distress that an hour's reading did not relieve.--Charles Louis de Secondat, Baron de la Brede et de Montesquieu (Pensées Diverses)
- I love to lose myself in other men's minds.--Charles Lamb (Last Essays of Elia)
- I was a hugely unchaperoned reader, and I would wander into my local public library and there was the world, waiting for me to look at it, to find out about it, to discover who I might be inside it.--Patrick Ness
- If the crowns of all the kingdoms of the empire were laid down at my feet in exchange for my books and my love of reading I would spurn them all.--François Fenelon
- If you believe everything you read, you better not read.--Japanese proverb
- If you wish to be a good reader--read.--Epictetus
- It is not true that we have only one life to live; if we can read, we can live as many more lives and as many kinds of lives as we wish.--S. I. Hayakawa
- ...it is very well worthwhile to be tormented for two or three years of one's life, for the sake of being able to read all the rest of it.--Jane Austen
- It is what you read when you don't have to that determines what you will be when you can't help it.--Oscar Wilde
- It's such a wonderful feeling to watch a child discover that reading is a marvelous adventure rather than a chore.--Zilpha Keatley Snyder
- Let us dare to read, think, speak and write.--John Adams
- Let us read and let us dance - two amusements that will never do any harm to the world.--Voltaire
- Life being very short, and the quiet hours of it few, we ought to waste none of them in reading useless books.--John Ruskin (Sesame and Lilies)
- The man who does not read good books is no better than the man who can't.--Mark Twain
- The man who reads only for improvement is beyond the hope of much improvement before he begins.--Jonathan Daniels (Three Presidents and their Books)
- The more that you read, the more things you will know.
The more you learn, the more places you'll go.—-Dr. Seuss
- Most of us would rather risk catastrophe than read the directions.--Mignon McLaughlin
- No entertainment is so cheap as reading, nor any pleasure so lasting.--Lady Mary Wortley Montague
- Oh, magic hour, when a child first knows she can read printed words!--Betty Smith (A Tree Grows in Brooklyn)
- Once you learn to read, you will be forever free.--Frederick Douglass
- One must be an inventor to read well. ...there is then creative reading as well as creative writing.--Ralph Waldo Emerson ("The American Scholar" address, Harvard Univ. 8/31/1837)
- Only one hour in the normal day is more pleasurable than the hours spent in bed with a book before going to sleep, and that is the hour spent in bed with a book after being called in the morning.--Rose Macauley
- The poet can only write the poems; it takes the reader to complete the meaning.--Nikki Giovanni
- The pleasure of all reading is doubled when one lives with another who shares the same books.--Katherine Mansfield
- Properly, we should read for power. Man reading should be man intensely alive. The book should be a ball of light in one's hand.--Ezra Pound
- Read an hour every day in your chosen field. This works out to about one book per week, 50 books per year, and will guarantee your success.--Brian Tracey (The Treasury of Quotes)
- Read at every wait; read at all hours; read within leisure; read in times of labor; read as one goes in; read as one goes out. The task of an educated mind is simply put: read to lead.--Cicero
- Read, every day, something no one else is reading. Think, every day, something no one else is thinking. Do, every day, something no one else would be silly enough to do. It is bad for the mind to be always part of unanimity.--Christopher Morley
- Reading aloud with children is known to be the single most important activity for building the knowledge and skills they will eventually require for learning to read.--Marilyn Jager Adams
- Reading furnishes the mind only with materials of knowledge; it is thinking that makes what we read ours.--John Locke
- Reading is an escape, an education, a delving into the brain of another human being on such an intimate level that every nuance of thought, every snapping of synapse, every slippery desire of the author is laid open before you like, well, a book.--Cynthia Heimel
- Reading is essential for those who seek to rise above the ordinary. We must not permit anything to stand between us and the book that could change our lives.--Jim Rohn (Jim Rohn's Weekly E-zine Febryary 4, 2003)
- Reading is the sole means by which we slip, involuntarily, often helplessly, into another’s skin, another’s voice, another’s soul.-—Joyce Carol Oates
- Reading is to the mind what exercise is to the body. It is wholesome and bracing for the mind to have its faculties kept on the stretch.--Ausustus Hare (also attributed to Sir Richard Steele)
- Reading not only enlarges and challenges the mind; it also engages and exercises the brain. Today's youth who sits mesmerized by a television screen is not going to be tomorrow's leader. Television watching is passive. Reading is active.--Richard M. Nixon (Leaders)
- Reading should not be presented to children as a chore, a duty. It should be offered as a gift.--Kate DiCamillo
- Resolve to edge in a little reading every day, if it is but a single sentence. If you gain fifteen minutes a day, it will make itself felt at the end of the year.--Horace Mann
- Seek the lofty by reading, hearing and seeing great work at some moment every day.--Thornton Wilder
- So please, oh PLEASE, we beg, we pray,
Go throw your TV set away,
And in its place you can install,
A lovely bookshelf on the wall.—-Roald Dahl (Charlie and the Chocolate Factory)
- 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)
- There are some people who read too much: The bibliobibuli. I know some who are constantly drunk on books, as others are drunk on whiskey or religion. They wander through this most diverting and stimulating of worlds in a haze, seeing nothing and hearing nothing.--H. L. Menchen
- There is divine beauty in learning, just as there is human beauty in tolerance. To learn means to accept the postulate that life did not begin at my birth. Others have been here before me, and I walk in their footsteps. The books I have read were composed by generations of fathers and sons, mothers and daughters, teachers and disciples. I am the sum total of their experiences, their quests. And so are you.--Elie Wiesel
- There is such seduction in a library of good books that I cannot resist the temptation to luxuriate in reading.--John Quincy Adams
- There is this idea that you either read to escape or you read to find yourself.--Matt Haig (Reasons to Stay Alive)
- This habit of reading ... is your pass to the most perfect pleasure that God has prepared for his creatures. It lasts when all other pleasures fade. It will make your hours pleasant to you as long as you live.--Anthony Trollope
- The time to read is any time: no apparatus, no appointment of time and place, is necessary. It is the only art which can be practiced at any hour of the day or night, whenever the time and inclination comes, that is your time for reading; in joy or sorrow, health or illness.-- Holbrook Jackson
- To learn to read is to light a fire; every syllable that is spelled out is a spark.—-Victor Hugo (Les Miserables)
- To read a writer is for me not merely to get an idea of what he says, but to go off with him, and travel in his company.--Andre Gide ("Third Imaginary Interview" Pretexts)
- To read well is to prepare oneself to live wisely, kindly and wittily.--Marilyn Chandler McEntyre
- The reading of all good books is like conversation with the finest men of past centuries.--Descartes ( Discourses on Method)
- To read is to fly: it is to soar to a point of vantage which gives a view over wide terrains of history, human variety, ideas, shared experience and the fruits of many inquiries.--A C Grayling
- To sit alone in the lamplight with a book spread out before you, and hold intimate converse with men of unseen generations--such is a pleasure beyond compare.--Kenko Yoshida
- To talk in public, to think in solitude, to read and to hear, to inquire and answer inquiries, is the business of the scholar.--Samuel Johnson
- Today a reader--tomorrow a leader.--W. Fusselman
- Until I feared I would lose it, I never loved to read. One does not love breathing.--Harper Lee
- We are the children of a technological age. We have found streamlined ways of doing much of our routine work. Printing is no longer the only way of reproducing books. Reading them, however, has not changed; it is the same as it has always been, since Callimachus administered the great library in Alexandrea.--Lawrence Clark Powell (Books in my Baggage)
- We could revolutionize education if we asked every person connected with the education of children, "Read any good books lately?"--Susan Ohanian
- We live at the level of our language. Whatever we can articulate we can imagine or explore. All you have to do to educate a child is leave him alone and teach him to read. The rest is brainwashing.--Ellen Gilcrist
- We must form our minds by reading deep rather than wide.--Marcus Fabius Quintilian
- We need the slower and more lasting stimulus of solitary reading as a relief from the pressure on eye, ear and nerves of the torrent of information and entertainment pouring from ever-open electronic jaws. It could end by stupefying us.--Storm Jameson (Parthian Words)
- 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.--Thomas Carlyle
- When I read great literature, great drama, speeches, or sermons, I feel that the human mind has not achieved anything greater than the ability to share feelings and thoughts through language.--James Earl Jones
- When you stack up all the years we are allowed against all there is to read, time is very short indeed.--Stephen King (from The Quotable Teacher, comp. by Howe)
- When you watch TV or see a film, you are looking at things happening to other people. Prose fiction is something you build up from twenty-six letters and a handful of punctuation marks, and you, and you alone, using your imagination, create a world, and people it and look out through other eyes.--Neil Gaiman
- While thought exists, words are alive and literature becomes an escape, not from, but into living.--Cyril Connolly (The Unquiet Grave)
- Write to be understood, speak to be heard, read to grow...--Lawrence Clark Powell (The Little Package)
- You are the same today that you are going to be in five years from now except for two things: the people with whom you associate and the books you read.--Charles "Tremendous" Jones
- You don't have to burn books to destroy a culture. Just get people to stop reading them.--Ray Bradbury
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This page last updated April 1, 2017.