Reading Quotes

I read my eyes out and can't read half enough ... The more one reads the more one sees we have to read.

John Adams

Reading is to the mind what exercise is to the body.

Joseph Addison

Of all the diversions of life, there is none so proper to fill up its empty spaces as the reading of useful and entertaining authors.

Joseph Addison

Reading is a basic tool in the living of a good life.

Mortimer Jerome Adler

I took a speed reading course and read 'War and Peace' in twenty minutes. It involves Russia.

Woody Allen

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

The world may be full of fourth-rate writers but it's also full of fourth-rate readers.

Stan Barstow

When we read a story, we inhabit it. The covers of the book are like a roof and four walls. What is to happen next will take place within the four walls of the story. And this is possible because the story's voice makes everything its own.

John Berger

The failure to read good books both enfeebles the vision and strengthens our most fatal tendency - the belief that the here and now is all there is.

Allan Bloom

Learn as much by writing as by reading.

John Dalberg

'Tis the good reader that makes the good book; a good head cannot read amiss: in every book he finds passages which seem confidences or asides hidden from all else and unmistakably meant for his ear.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

To read a writer is for me not merely to get an idea of what he says, but to go off with him and travel in his company.

Andre Gide

A man ought to read just as inclination leads him, for what he reads as a task will do him little good.

Samuel Johnson

What is reading but silent conversation?

Walter Savage Landor

After all, the world is not a stage - not to me: nor a theatre: nor a show-house of any sort. And art, especially novels, are not little theatres where the reader sits aloft and watches ... and sighs, commiserates, condones and smiles. That's what you want a book to be: because it leaves you so safe and superior, with your two-dollar ticket to the show. And that's what my books are not and never will be ... Whoever reads me will be in the thick of the scrimmage, and if he doesn't like it if he wants a safe seat in the audience - let him read someone else.

D. H. Lawrence

Until I feared I would lose it, I never loved to read. One does not love breathing.

Harper Lee

Readers are plentiful: thinkers are rare.

Harriet Martineau

I have never known any distress that an hour's reading did not relieve.

Montesquieu

Extensive reading is a priceless treasure.

Old Proverbs, Wise Sayings; Collected & published by the Quotationary compiler for 6th grade class project, age 12

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

10 Reasons to Read to Your Child
1. Because when you hold them and give them this attention, they know you love them.
2. Because reading to them will encourage them to become readers.
3. Because children's books today are so good that they are fun, even for adults.
4. Children's book illustrations often rank with the best, giving them a lifelong feeling for good art.
5. Books are one way of passing on your moral values to them. Readers know how to put themselves in
other's shoes.
6. Because every teacher and librarian they ever encounter will thank you.
7. Because, until they learn how to read themselves, they will think you are magic.
8. Because it's nostalgic.
9. Because, for that short space of time, they will stay clean.
10. Because, if you do, they may then let you read in peace.

The Unabashed Librarian Magazine, No. 39.

There are books so alive that you're always afraid that while you weren't reading, the book has gone and changed, has shifted like a river; while you went on living, it went on living too, and like a river moved on and moved away. No one has stepped twice into the same river. But did anyone ever step twice into the same book?

Marina Tsvetaeva