Reading quotes
6.6K quotes on this topic — from poets, philosophers, and thinkers across history.
"Today's sensitive male has learned to share in open frank discussions about relationships like, "Where the hell did you get a crazy idea like that? You been reading Redbook again?""
"Don’t you love the Oxford Dictionary? When I first read it, I thought it was a really really long poem about everything."
"There exists a law, not written down anywhere but inborn in our hearts; a law which comes to us not by training or custom or reading but by derivation and absorption and adoption from nature itself; a law which has come to us not from theory but from practice, not by instruction but by natural intuition. I refer to the law which lays it down that, if our lives are endangered by plots or violence or armed robbers or enemies, any and every method of protecting ourselves is morally right."
"The reading of all good books is like a conversation with the finest minds of past centuries."
"We must be ready to allow ourselves to be interrupted by God, who will thwart our plans and frustrate our ways time and again, even daily, by sending people across our path with their demands and requests. We can, then, pass them by, preoccupied with our important daily tasks, just as the priest-perhaps reading the Bible-passed by the man who had fallen among robbers. When we do that, we pass by the visible sign of the Cross raised in our lives to show us that God’s way, and not our own, is what counts."
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"Every kid in every school no matter their background, deserves to learn the basics about food - where it comes from, how to cook it and how it affects their bodies. These life skills are as important as reading and writing, but they've been lost over the past few generations. We need to bring them back and bring up our kids to be streetwise about food."
"My grandmother was an English teacher for a while. And she stressed to me the importance of reading, being able to articulate well."
"If your heart takes more pleasure in reading novels, or watching TV, or going to the movies, or talking to friends, rather than just sitting alone with God and embracing Him, sharing His cares and His burdens, weeping and rejoicing with Him, then how are you going to handle forever and ever in His presence? You'd be bored to tears in heaven, if you're not ecstatic about God now!"
"We are the Bibles the world is reading; We are the creeds the world is needing; We are the sermons the world is heeding."
"If the literature we are reading does not wake us, why then do we read it? A literary work must be an ice-axe to break the sea frozen inside us."
"Education begins the gentleman, but reading, good company, and reflection must finish him."
"The Brahmins say that in their books there are many predictions of times in which it will rain. But press those books as strongly as you can, you can not get out of them a drop of water. So you can not get out of all the books that contain the best precepts the smallest good deed."
"A lamp can only light another lamp when it continues to burn in its own flame."
"To acquire the habit of reading is to construct for yourself a refuge from almost all the miseries of life."
"There comes a point in your life when you need to stop reading other people's books and write your own."
"Many a book is like a key to unknown chambers within the castle of one’s own self."
"That is part of the beauty of all literature. You discover that your longings are universal longings, that you're not lonely and isolated from anyone. You belong."
"The only advice ... that one person can give another about reading is to take no advice, to follow your own instincts, to use your own reason, to come to your own conclusions."
"Knowing you have something good to read before bed is among the most pleasurable of sensations."
"I cannot sleep unless I am surrounded by books."
"Reading makes all other learning possible. We have to get books into our children's hands early and often."
"Make your own Bible. Select and collect all the words and sentences that in all your readings have been to you like the blast of a trumpet."
"If anyone spends almost the whole day in reading...he gradually loses the capacity for thinking...This is the case with many learned persons; they have read themselves stupid"
"Books are the bees which carry the quickening pollen from one to another mind."
"The very practice of reading [the Bible] will have a purifying effect upon your mind and heart. Let nothing take the place of this daily exercise."
