To be a well-favoured man is the gift of fortune but to write and read comes by nature.
— Much Ado About Nothing
Quotes About Reading
Jean-Paul Sartre called books his religion and the library his temple. Nothing seemed more important to him than a book. Socrates advised employing your time in improving yourself by other men's writings, so that you come easily by what others have labored hard for. Bill Gates says his childhood dreams grew out of the chance to read a lot. Cervantes shows the risk of going too far: a man whose brain dries up from sleepless nights and endless pages.
Hemingway recalls that in those days, there was no money to buy books. Tolkien insists that a good vocabulary comes from reading books above one, not from books written according to some notion of the vocabulary of one's age group. That is a demanding path. Sartre's temple is built by such readers, people who treat every page as a doorway to someone else's labor, and to the dreams they carried.
Hemingway recalls that in those days, there was no money to buy books. Tolkien insists that a good vocabulary comes from reading books above one, not from books written according to some notion of the vocabulary of one's age group. That is a demanding path. Sartre's temple is built by such readers, people who treat every page as a doorway to someone else's labor, and to the dreams they carried.
Oh! it is absurd to have a hard-and-fast rule about what one should read and what one shouldn't. More than half of modern culture depends on what one shouldn't read.
— The Importance of Being Earnest
Madam Pince, our librarian, tells me that it is 'pawed about, dribbled on, and generally maltreated' nearly everyday - a high compliment for any book.
— Quidditch Through the Ages
Do you love tragedies and everything that breaks the heart?
— Thus Spoke Zarathustra
When I am king they shall not have bread and shelter only, but also teachings out of books, for a full belly is little worth where the mind is starved.
— The Prince and the Pauper
Literature is strewn with the wreckage of those who have minded beyond reason the opinion of others.
— A Room of One's Own
A fondness for reading, properly directed, must be an education in itself.
— Mansfield Park
...and he glanced at the backs of the books, with an awakened curiosity that went below the binding. No one who can read, ever looks at a book, even unopened on a shelf, like one who cannot.
— Our Mutual Friend
People do not read stupidities with impunity.
— Les Misérables
The best books... are those that tell you what you know already.
— 1984
A good vocabulary is not acquired by reading books written according to some notion of the vocabulary of one's age group. It comes from reading books above one.
— The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien
There are perhaps no days of our childhood we lived so fully as those we believe we left without having lived them, those we spent with a favorite book.
— Days of Reading
In those days, there was no money to buy books.
— A Moveable Feast
All that is necessary for a student is access to a library.
— The Papers of Thomas Jefferson, Volume 16: November 1789 to July 1790
Fools have a habit of believing that everything written by a famous author is admirable. For my part I read only to please myself and like only what suits my taste.
— Candide
Buying books would be a good thing if one could also buy the time to read them in: but as a rule the purchase of books is mistaken for the appropriation of their contents.
— Counsels and Maxims
Literature is my Utopia. Here I am not disenfranchised. No barrier of the senses shuts me out from the sweet, gracious discourses of my book friends. They talk to me without embarrassment or awkwardness.
— The Story of My Life
The age of the pulp magazine was the last in which youngsters, to get their primitive material, were forced to be literate.
— I. Asimov
I had found my religion: nothing seemed more important to me than a book. I saw the library as a temple.
— The Words
Some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested.
— The Essays
I think we ought to read only the kind of books that wound and stab us. If the book we’re reading doesn’t wake us up with a blow on the head, what are we reading it for?
— Letters to Friends, Family, and Editors
Personally, I am a hedonistic reader; I have never read a book merely because it was ancient. I read books for the aesthetic emotions they offer me, and I ignore the commentaries and criticism.
— Seven Nights
Lectio, quae placuit, decies repetita placebit.(What we read with pleasure we can read many times with pleasure.)
— Arte poética
I read my eyes out and can't read half enough...the more one reads the more one sees we have to read.
— Letters of John Adams, Addressed to His Wife