quotations about reading
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
Read to live, not live to read.
EDWARD BULWER-LYTTON
The Caxtons
By reading we acquaint ourselves in a very extensive manner with the affairs, actions, and thoughts of the living and the dead, in the most remote nations and in the most distant ages; and that with as much ease as though they lived in our own age and nation.
ISAAC WATTS
The Improvement of the Mind
A peasant that reads is a prince in waiting.
WALTER MOSLEY
The Long Fall
It may be well to wait a century for a reader, as God has waited six thousand years for an observer.
JOHANNES KEPLER
attributed, The Martyrs of Science
To read is to enter an intercourse with a text.
VARUN BEGLEY
"The Unbearable Freud"
Reading furnishes the mind only with materials of knowledge; it is thinking that makes what we read ours.
JOHN LOCKE
A Treatise on the Conduct of the Understanding
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
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
Why can't people just sit and read books and be nice to each other?
DAVID BALDACCI
The Camel Club
And better had they ne'er been born,
Who read to doubt, or read to scorn.
WALTER SCOTT
The Monastery
You don't have to burn books to destroy a culture. Just get people to stop reading them.
RAY BRADBURY
attributed, Book Savvy
The whole point of straws, I had thought, was that you did not have to set down the slice of pizza to suck a dose of Coke while reading a paperback.
NICHOLSON BAKER
The Mezzanine
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
attributed, The Miracle of Language
A classic is a book that has never finished saying what it has to say.
ITALO CALVINO
The Uses of Literature
No entertainment is so cheap as reading, nor any pleasure so lasting.
LADY W. M. MONTAGUE
attributed, Day's Collacon
The man who does not read ... has no advantage over the man who can't read.
MARK TWAIN
attributed, The Wit & Wisdom of Mark Twain
Reading is escape, and the opposite of escape; it's a way to make contact with reality after a day of making things up, and it's a way of making contact with someone else's imagination after a day that's all too real.
NORA EPHRON
I Feel Bad about My Neck: And Other Thoughts on Being a Woman
If one cannot enjoy reading a book over and over again, there is no use in reading it at all.
OSCAR WILDE
The Decay of Lying
We read for instruction, for correction, and for consolation.
QUEEN CHRISTINA OF SWEDEN
attributed, Day's Collacon