Reading Quotations

"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 (1672-1719)



Thomas Moore:
"The many great gardens of the world, of literature and poetry, of painting and music, of religion and architecture, all make the point as clear as possible: The soul cannot thrive in the absence of a garden. If you don't want paradise, you are not human; and if you are not human, you don't have a soul."



"Books are not made for furniture, but there is nothing else that so beautifully furnishes a house. "
- Henry Ward Beecher



"A library is a hospital for the mind. " Anonymous



"I divide all readers into two classes: Those who read to remember and those who read to forget. "
- William Phelps



"Reading is a basic tool in the living of a good life." Mortimer J. Adler (b.1902)

"Some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few are to be chewed and digested."
- Francis Bacon (1561-1626)

"He that loves a book will never want a faithful friend, a wholesome counselor, a cheerful companion, an effectual comforter. By study, by reading, by thinking, one may innocently divert and pleasantly entertain himself, as in all weathers, as in all fortunes."
-Barrow

"All the best stories in the world are but one story in reality -- the story of escape. It is the only thing which interests us all and at all times, how to escape."
- Arthur Christopher Benson

"A conventional good read is usually a bad read, a relaxing bath in what we know already. A true good read is surely an act of innovative creation in which we, the readers, become conspirators."
-Malcolm Bradbury (b.1932)

"You don't have to burn books to destroy a culture. Just get people to stop reading them." -Ray Bradbury (b.1920)

"There are three schoolmasters for everybody that will employ them -- the senses, intelligent companions, and books. "
-Henry Ward Beecher

"Tell me what you read and I'll tell you who you are" is true enough, but I'd know you better if you told me what you reread.
-François Mauriac

"October is crisp days and cool nights, a time to curl up around the dancing flames and sink into a good book."
- John Sinor





"I've never known any trouble that an hour's reading didn't assuage."


- Charles de Secondat





"I cannot live without books."


-Thomas Jefferson





"The book to read is not the one which thinks for you, but the one which makes you think. " -James McCosh





"Outside of a dog a book is man's best. Inside of a dog it's too dark to read."


-Groucho Marx





"I must say that I find television very educational. The minute somebody turns it on, I go to the library and read a book. "


-Groucho Marx





"A book is like a garden carried in the pocket. "


-Chinese Proverb





"Anyone who has a library and a garden wants for nothing."


-Cicero





"He who destroys a good book kills reason itself."


-John Milton





"Be as careful of the books you read, as of the company you keep, for your habits and character will be as much influenced by the former as the latter."


-Paxton Hood





"Don't join the book burners... Don't be afraid to go in your library and read every book. " Dwight D. Eisenhower





"Except a living man, there is nothing more wonderful than a book."


-Charles Kingsley





"To acquire the habit of reading is to construct for yourself a refuge from almost all of the miseries of life. "


-W. Somerset Maugham





"Never read a book through merely because you have begun it."


-John Witherspoon





"A good book is the best of friends, the same today and forever."


-Martin Tupper





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


-Ralph Waldo Emerson





"Wherever they burn books they will also, in the end, burn human beings."


-Heinrich Heine





"Books are the quietest and most constant of friends: they are the most accessible and wisest of counsellors, and the most patient of teachers."


-Charles W. Eliot





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


-Richard Steele





"I have often reflected upon the new vistas that reading opened to me. I knew right there in prison that reading had changed forever the course of my life. As I see it today, the ability to read awoke in me some long dormant craving to be mentally alive."


-Malcolm X





"If we encounter a man of rare intellect, we should ask him what books he reads."


-Ralph Waldo Emerson





"In a very real sense, people who have read good literature have lived more than people who cannot or will not read."


- S. I. Hayakawa