READING QUOTES III
quotations about reading
Let us read, and let us dance; these two amusements will never do any harm to the world.
VOLTAIRE
A Philosophical Dictionary
A house without books is like a room without windows.
HENRY WARD BEECHER
"The Duty of Owning Books", Manford's Magazine, Volume 30
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
Reading ... is an activity subsequent to writing: more resigned, more civil, more intellectual.
JORGE LUIS BORGES
Universal History of Infamy
Human beings can lose their lives in libraries. They ought to be warned.
SAUL BELLOW
Him With His Foot in His Mouth and Other Stories
While we read a novel, we are insane--bonkers. We believe in the existence of people who aren't there, we hear their voices, we watch the battle of Borodino with them, we may even become Napoleon. Sanity returns (in most cases) when the book is closed.
URSULA K. LE GUIN
The Language of the Night: Essays on Fantasy and Science Fiction
Reading gives us someplace to go when we have to stay where we are.
ANONYMOUS
The simplest way to make sure that we raise literate children is to teach them to read, and to show them that reading is a pleasurable activity. And that means, at its simplest, finding books that they enjoy, giving them access to those books, and letting them read them. I don't think there is such a thing as a bad book for children.
NEIL GAIMAN
"Why our future depends on libraries, reading and daydreaming", The Guardian, October 15, 2013
Some people read too much: the bibliobuli ... who are constantly drunk on books, as other men are drunk on whiskey or religion. They wander through the most diverting and stimulating of worlds in a haze, seeing nothing and hearing nothing.
H. L. MENCKEN
"Minority Report", Notebooks
People read everything nowadays, except books.
MADAME SWETCHINE
attributed, Day's Collacon
Much reading has brought upon us a learned barbarism.
GEORG CHRISTOPH LICHTENBERG
"Notebook F", Aphorisms
In a polite age almost every person becomes a reader, and receives more instruction from the Press than the Pulpit.
OLIVER GOLDSMITH
The Citizen of the World
Finally, from so little sleeping and so much reading, his brain dried up and he went completely out of his mind.
MIGUEL DE CERVANTES
Don Quixote
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
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
To read without reflecting is like eating without digesting.
EDMUND BURKE
attributed, Day's Collacon
The danger of reading too much is that we shall have only the thoughts of others. The danger of reading too little or none at all, that we shall have none but our own.
LORD ACTON
attributed, Day's Collacon
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
Education ... has produced a vast population able to read but unable to distinguish what is worth reading.
G. M. TREVELYAN
English Social History
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