Quotes on Reading

Words are the voice of the heart.

T'is true: there's magic in the web of it.

I had just taken to reading. I had just discovered the art of leaving my body to sit impassive in a crumpled up attitude in a chair or sofa, while I wandered over the hills and far away in novel company and new scenes... My world began to expand very rapidly,... the reading habit had got me securely.

When I step into this library, I cannot understand why I ever step out of it.

What's a book? Everything or nothing. The eye that sees it all.

Force yourself to reflect on what you read, paragraph by paragraph.

I will defend the importance of bedtime stories to my last gasp.

A parent or a teacher has only his lifetime; a good book can teach forever.

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.

You write with ease, to show your breeding, But easy writing's vile hard reading.

There is a great deal of difference between an eager man who wants to read a book and the tired man who wants a book to read.

It is not all books that are as dull as their readers.

A man who is eating or lying with his wife or preparing to go to sleep in humility, thankfulness and temperance, is, by Christian standards, in an infinitely higher state than one who is listening to Bach or reading Plato in a state of pride.

I didn't go to school much, so I taught myself what I knew from reading.

With a library you are free, not confined by temporary political climates. It is the most democratic of institutions because no one - but no one at all - can tell you what to read and when and how.

Great books help you understand, and they help you feel understood.

God be thanked for books; they are the voices of the distant and the dead, and make us heirs of the spiritual life of past ages.

At least half the mystery novels published violate the law that the solution, once revealed, must seem to be inevitable.

Leadership, like swimming, cannot be learned by reading about it.

I can't bear art that you can walk round and admire. A book should be either a bandit or a rebel or a man in the crowd.

What we read with inclination makes a much stronger impression. If we read without inclination, half the mind is employed in fixing the attention; so there is but one half to be employed on what we read.