Famously Said Random quote

Quotes about reading

116 quotes from 88 people

Most readBy personPage 5 of 8

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 Pound1885–1972Guide to Kulchur (1938), p. 55
Long books, when read, are usually overpraised, because the reader wants to convince others and himself that he has not wasted his time.
E. M. Forster1879–1970Commonplace Book (1985), p. 11
If I have not read a book before, it is, to all intents and purposes, new to me, whether it was printed yesterday or three hundred years ago.
William Hazlitt1778–1830“On Reading New Books” (1825)
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 Penn1644–1718Advice to his children (1699)
In the highest civilization, the book is still the highest delight. He who has once known its satisfactions is provided with a resource against calamity.
Ralph Waldo Emerson1803–1882Letters and Social Aims (1876), Quotation and Originality
‘Tis the good reader that makes the good book; in every book he finds passages which seem confidences or asides hidden from all else and unmistakenly meant for his ear.
Ralph Waldo Emerson1803–1882Society and Solitude (1870), Success
In books lies the soul of the whole Past Time; the articulate audible voice of the Past, when the body and material substance of it has altogether vanished like a dream.
Thomas Carlyle1795–1881The Hero as Man of Letters
- History
Books are the legacies that a great genius leaves to mankind, which are delivered down from generation to generation, as presents to the posterity of those who are yet unborn.
Joseph Addison1672–1719The Spectator (1711–1714), No. 166 (10 September 1711)
- Genius
When I read a book I seem to read it with my eyes only, but now and then I come across a passage, perhaps only a phrase, which has a meaning for me, and it becomes part of me.
W. Somerset Maugham1874–1965Of Human Bondage (1915), Ch. 67In context
I should as soon think of swimming across Charles River when I wish to go to Boston, as of reading all my books in originals when I have them rendered for me in my mother tongue.
Ralph Waldo Emerson1803–1882Society and Solitude (1870), Books
If some books are deemed most baneful and their sale forbid, how, then, with deadlier facts, not dreams of doting men? Those whom books will hurt will not be proof against events. Events, not books, should be forbid.
Herman Melville1819–1891The Encantadas (1854), Sketch Eighth
Some day you will be old enough to start reading fairy tales again.
C. S. Lewis1898–1963The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe (1950), Dedication: “To Lucy Barfield”
- Age
I can’t imagine a man really enjoying a book and reading it only once.
C. S. Lewis1898–1963Letter to Arthur Greeves (February 1932); in They Stand Together: The Letters of C. S. Lewis to Arthur Greeves, 1914–1963 (1979), p. 439
God forbid that any book should be banned. The practice is as indefensible as infanticide.
Rebecca West1892–1983“The Tosh Horse,” The New Statesman (1925)
- Freedom
Lock up your libraries if you like; but there is no gate, no lock, no bolt that you can set upon the freedom of my mind.
Virginia Woolf1882–1941A Room of One’s Own (1929), Ch. 4, p. 90
- Freedom