READING QUOTES IV
quotations about reading
If you don't have the time to read, you don't have the time or the tools to write.
STEPHEN KING
On Writing
Multifarious reading weakens the mind like smoking, and is an excuse for its lying dormant.
F. W. ROBERTSON
attributed, Day's Collacon
Reading gives us someplace to go when we have to stay where we are.
ANONYMOUS
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
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
I will read anything rather than work.
JEAN KERR
introduction, Please Don't Eat the Daisies
Learn to read slow; all other graces
Will follow in their proper places.
WILLIAM WALKER
Art of Reading
Reading is sometimes an ingenious device for avoiding thought.
SIR ARTHUR HELPS
Friends in Council
Reading was my escape and my comfort, my consolation, my stimulant of choice: reading for the pure pleasure of it, for the beautiful stillness that surrounds you when you hear an author's words reverberating in your head.
PAUL AUSTER
The Brooklyn Follies
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
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
Reading is thinking with some one else's head instead of one's own.
ARTHUR SCHOPENHAUER
"On Thinking for Oneself", Parerga und Paralipomena
Reading makes a full Man, Meditation a profound Man, Discourse a clear Man.
BENJAMIN FRANKLIN
Poor Richard's Almanac
To read merely for reading's sake is almost as unprofitable as not reading at all. Setting out, in the first place with a clear idea of what we wish to learn, which is eminently important, we must afterwards, if we would realize what we have read, reperuse it in thought. This only makes it truly our own.
LEO HARTLEY GRINDON
Life: Its Nature, Varieties, and Phenomena
Today a reader, tomorrow a leader.
W. FUSSELLMAN
"Slogans for a Library", The Library, April 1926
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
If we encountered a man of rare intellect, we should ask him what books he read.
RALPH WALDO EMERSON
Letters and Social Aims
The ability to read awoke inside of me some long dormant craving to be mentally alive.
MALCOLM X
The Autobiography of Malcolm X
The best moments in reading are when you come across something -- a thought, a feeling, a way of looking at things -- which you had thought special and particular to you. Now here it is, set down by someone else, a person you have never met, someone even who is long dead. And it is as if a hand has come out and taken yours.
ALAN BENNETT
The History Boys
The more imagination the reader has ... the more he will do for himself. He will, at a mere hint from the author, flood wretched material with suggestion and never guess that he is himself chiefly making what he enjoys.
C. S. LEWIS
"On Stories", Of Other Worlds: Essays and Stories