Reading quotes and aphorisms chosen from various very wise and famous writers in order to emphasize the importance of books, of reading and of readers.
The reading of all good books is like a conversation with all the finest men of past centuries.
Rene Descartes
Hypocrite reader – my fellow – my brother!
Charles Baudelaire
The first thing that reading teaches us is how to be alone.
Jonathan Franzen
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 in order to live.
Gustave Flaubert
Don’t just say that you have read books. Show that through them you have learned to think better.
Epictetus
Read not to contradict and confute, nor to believe and take for granted… but to weigh and consider.
Francis Bacon
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
There is an art of reading, as well as an art of thinking, and an art of writing.
Isaac Disraeli
When we are alone and feeling low, a good book can listen to us and we can gather comfort, consolation and strength!
Carl William Brown
You don’t have to burn books to destroy a culture. Just get people to stop reading them.
Ray Bradbury
How well he’s read, to reason against reading!
William Shakespeare
Read nothing that you do not care to remember, and remember nothing you do not mean to use.
Professor Blackie
You will, I am sure, agree with me that… if page 534 only finds us in the second chapter, the length of the first one must have been really intolerable.
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
The good of a book lies in its being read. A book is made up of signs that speak of other signs, which in their turn speak of things. Without an eye to read them, a book contains signs that produce no concepts; therefore it is dumb.
Umberto Eco
We should be as careful of the books we read, as of the company we keep. The dead very often have more power than the living.
Tryon Edwards
Today a reader, tomorrow a leader.
W. Fusselman
To live as a vegetable you don’t need to read!
Carl William Brown
No story is the same to us after a lapse of time; or rather we who read it are no longer the same interpreters.
George Eliot
If we encounter a man of rare intellect, we should ask him what books he reads.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Never read any book that is not a year old.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
To be a good writer and why not also a passionate reader you must be able to listen to the dead and talk to them.
Carl William Brown
Our high respect for a well read person is praise enough for literature.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
There is creative reading as well as creative writing.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
‘Tis the good reader that makes the good book; in every book he finds passages which seem to be confidences or sides hidden from all else and unmistakably meant for his ear; the profit of books is according to the sensibility of the reader; the profound thought or passion sleeps as in a mine, until it is discovered by an equal mind and heart.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
When you reread a classic, you do not see more in the book than you did before; you see more in you than there was before.
Cliff Fadiman
Read, read, read. Read everything – trash, classics, good and bad, and see how they do it. Just like a carpenter who works as an apprentice and studies the master. Read! You’ll absorb it. Then write. If it is good, you’ll find out. If it’s not, throw it out the window.
William Faulkner
In science, read by preference the newest works. In literature, read the oldest. The classics are always modern.
Edward G. Bulwer-Lytton
Reading without purpose is sauntering not exercise.
Edward G. Bulwer-Lytton
One may as well be asleep as to read for anything but to improve his mind and morals, and regulate his conduct.
Laurence Sterne
Digressions, incontestably, are the sunshine; they are the life, the soul of reading!
Laurence Sterne
Read much, but not many books.
Benjamin Franklin
Reading makes a full man, meditation a profound man, discourse a clear man.
Benjamin Franklin
After all manner of professors have done their best for us, the place we are to get knowledge is in books. The true university of these days is a collection of books.
Thomas Carlyle
No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader.
Robert Frost
My early and invincible love of reading I would not exchange for all the riches of India.
Edward Gibbon
As writers become more numerous, it is natural for readers to become more indolent; whence must necessarily arise a desire of attaining knowledge with the greatest possible ease.
Oliver Goldsmith
The first time I read an excellent work, it is to me just as if I gained a new friend; and when I read over a book I have perused before, it resembles the meeting of an old one.
Sir James Goldsmith
I read part of it all the way through.
Samuel Goldwyn
In the dead I always read something new while and in the living I heard telling a thousand times thousands of old things.
A.F. Doni
Reading is sometimes an ingenious device for avoiding thought.
Sir Arthur Helps
Be as careful of the books you read, as of the company you keep; for your habits and character will be as much influenced by the former as by the latter.
Paxton Hood
The books we read should be chosen with great care, that they may be, as an Egyptian king wrote over his library, “The medicines of the soul.”
Paxton Hood
It is from books that wise people derive consolation in the troubles of life.
Victor Hugo
To learn to read is to light a fire; every syllable that is spelled out is a spark.
Victor Hugo
Read as you taste fruit or savor wine, or enjoy friendship, love or life.
Holbrook Jackson
Reading is a basic tool in the living of a good life.
Mortimer J. Adler
I am not a speed reader. I am a speed understander.
Isaac Asimov
To feel most beautifully alive means to be reading something beautiful, ready always to apprehend in the flow of language the sudden flash of poetry.
Gaston Bachelard
Readers are fictional characters created by the writers’ imagination.
Achille Campanile
A man ought to read just as his inclination leads him; for what he reads as a task will do him little good.
Samuel Johnson
What is written without effort is in general read without pleasure.
Samuel Johnson
You will be the same person in five years as you are today except for the people you meet and the books you read.
Charles “Tremendous” Jones
The Bible remained for me a book of books, still divine – but divine in the sense that all great books are divine which teach men how to live righteously.
Sir Arthur Keith
To sit alone in the lamplight with a book spread out before you hold intimate converse with men of unseen generations – such is pleasure beyond compare.
Yoshida Kenko
I am a part of everything that I have read.
John Kieran
You can either read something many times in order to be assured that you got it all, or else you can define your purpose and use techniques which will assure that you have met it and gotten what you need.
Peter Kump
I love to lose myself in other men’s minds. When I am not walking, I am reading. I cannot sit and think; books think for me.
Charles Lamb
What is reading, but silent conversation.
Walter Savage Landor
Reading means borrowing.
Georg C. Lichtenberg
There are very many people who read simply to prevent themselves from thinking.
Georg C. Lichtenberg
Reading furnishes the mind only with material for knowledge; it is thinking that makes what we read ours.
John Locke
An author can write a book, but only the readers can make it speak and by voicing it, make people to listen to it.
Carl William Brown
Reading furnishes the mind only with material for knowledge; it is thinking that makes what we read ours.
John Locke
Many readers judge of the power of a book by the shock it gives their feelings — as some savage tribes determine the power of muskets by their recoil; that being considered best which fairly prostrates the purchaser.
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
Many readers judge of the power of a book by the shock it gives their feelings — as some savage tribes determine the power of muskets by their recoil; that being considered best which fairly prostrates the purchaser.
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
The multitude of books is a great evil. There is no limit to this fever for writing.
Martin Luther
Everything in the world exists to end up in a book.
Stephane Mallarme
Readers are plentiful: thinkers are rare.
Harriet Martineau
Once we have learned to read, meaning of words can somehow register without consciousness.
Anthony Marcel
From the moment I picked your book up until I laid it down I was convulsed with laughter. Some day I intend reading it.
Groucho Marx
Outside of a dog, a book is man’s best friend. Inside of a dog, it’s too dark to read.
Groucho Marx
The world may be full of fourth-rate writers but it’s also full of fourth-rate readers.
Stan Barstow
It is well to read everything of something, and something of everything.
Lord Henry P. Brougham
I would sooner read a timetable or a catalog than nothing at all.
W. Somerset Maugham
What is important is not to be able to read rapidly, but to be able to decide what not to read.
James T. Mccay
Any book that helps a child to form a habit of reading, to make reading one of his deep and continuing needs, is good for him.
Richard McKenna
A successful book cannot afford to be more than ten percent new.
Marshall McLuhan
The chief knowledge that a man gets from reading books, is the knowledge that very few of them are worth reading.
H. L. Mencken
There are people who read too much: bibliobibuli. I know some who are constantly drunk on books, as other men 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. Mencken
There are two kinds of books. Those that no one reads and those that no one ought to read.
H. L. Mencken
All my good reading, you might say, was done in the toilet. There are passages in Ulysses which can be read only in the toilet – if one wants to extract the full flavor of their content.
Henry Miller
The worst readers are those who behave like plundering troops: they take away a few things they can use, dirty and confound the remainder, and revile the whole.
Friedrich Nietzsche
Read good, big important things.
Peggy Noonan
The books one reads in childhood, and perhaps most of all the bad and good bad books, create in one’s mind a sort of false map of the world, a series of fabulous countries into which one can retreat at odd moments throughout the rest of life, and which in some cases can survive a visit to the real countries which they are supposed to represent.
George Orwell
Much reading is an oppression of the mind, and extinguishes the natural candle, which is the reason of so many senseless scholars in the world.
William Penn
I divide all readers into two classes: those who read to remember and those who read to forget.
William Lyon Phelps
What gunpowder did for war the printing press has done for the mind.
Wendell Phillips
The book you don’t read won’t help.
Jim Rohn
Prerequisite for rereadability in books: that they be forgettable.
Jean Rostand
A book worth reading is worth buying.
John Ruskin
You should read books like you take medicine, by advice, and not by advertisement.
John Ruskin
What I like best is a book that’s at least funny once in a while. What really knocks me out is a book that, when you’re all done reading it, you wish the author that wrote it was a terrific friend of yours and you could call him up on the phone whenever you felt like it. That doesn’t happen much, though.
J. D. Salinger
Reading is equivalent to thinking with someone else’s head instead of with one’s own.
Arthur Schopenhauer
Without books the development of civilization would have been impossible. They are the engines of change, windows on the world, “Lighthouses” as the poet said “erected in the sea of time.” They are companions, teachers, magicians, bankers of the treasures of the mind, Books are humanity in print.
Arthur Schopenhauer
I’ve never known any trouble than an hour’s reading didn’t assuage.
Charles de Secondat
Don’t ask me who’s influenced me. A lion is made up of the lambs he’s digested, and I’ve been reading all my life.
Giorgos Seferis
Then I thought of reading – the nice and subtle happiness of reading … this joy not dulled by age, this polite and unpunishable vice, this selfish, serene, lifelong intoxication.
Logan Pearsall Smith
Live always in the best company when you read.
Sydney Smith
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.
Sir Richard Steele
Books must be read as deliberately and reservedly as they were written.
Henry David Thoreau
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. At present unutterable things we may find somewhere uttered.
Henry David Thoreau
Read the best books first, or you may not have a chance to read them at all.
Henry David Thoreau
To read well, that is, to read true books in a true spirit, is a noble exercise, and one that will task the reader more than any other exercise which the customs of the day esteem. It requires a training such as the athletes underwent, the steady intention almost of the whole life to this object.
Henry David Thoreau
I always begin at the left with the opening word of the sentence and read toward the right and I recommend this method.
James Thurber
Education… has produced a vast population able to read but unable to distinguish what is worth reading, an easy prey to sensations and cheap appeals.
G. M. Trevelyan
A classic is something that everybody wants to have read and nobody wants to read.
Mark Twain
The man who does not read books has no advantage over the man that can not read them.
Mark Twain
Reading the Scriptures is an uplifting experience.
Author Unknown
The book to read is not the one which thinks for you, but the one which makes you think. No book in the world equals the Bible for that.
Author Unknown
Those who do not read are no better off than those who cannot read.
Author Unknown
To find out more about the importance of reading you can also read:
The nature and essence of literature
