Reading quotes
6.6K quotes on this topic — from poets, philosophers, and thinkers across history.
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Browse quotes that often appear alongside reading — connected by shared ideas and recurring themes.
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"It turns out I had this huge geeky safety net out there that I didn’t know about this whole time, made up of people who have been reading my comic for nine years but never contacted me."
"Anything we need to know, we can learn it from a book. Reading, careful study, a little practice, and we’re throwing knives expertly, overhauling engines, speaking Esperanto like natives."
"The real reason Milton went blind was to avoid reading unsolicited manuscripts."
"All there is to writing is having ideas. To learn to write is to learn to have ideas."
"In anything fit to be called by the name of reading, the process itself should be absorbing and voluptuous; we should gloat over a book, be rapt clean out of ourselves."
"I believe that the habit of constant reading of good books and scholarly periodicals and magazines in many disciplines is vital to give a larger perspective and to constantly sense the interdependent nature of life."
"Reading a book by someone you respect allows some of their brilliance to rub off on you."
"I just got out of the hospital. I was in a speed-reading accident. I hit a bookmark."
"I took a course in speed reading. Then I got Reader's Digest on microfilm. By the time I got the machine set up, I was done."
"My doctors told me this morning my blood pressure is down so low that I can start reading the newspapers."
"I am so sick of reading about another car bomb, another suicide bomber, another 10, 20, 30, 70, 100 people dead in a day, both Americans and Iraqis."
"Are you unselfish? That is the question. If you are, you will be perfect without reading a single religious book, without going into a single church or temple."
"We were taught instead of just reading about life we needed to go out and live it."
"And out of a desire essentially to imitate what I was reading, I began to write, like a clever monkey."
"I began as a boy with artistic talent... as a visual artist... I thought that was what I'd become and in my late teens drifted into reading serious literature."
"If you are a man of learning, read something classic, a history of the human struggle and don't settle for mediocre verse."
"I don't want learning, or dignity, or respectability. I want this music, and this dawn, and the warmth of your cheek against mine."
"Imagine - four years you could have spent travelling around Europe meeting people, or going to the Far East of Africa or India, meeting people, exchanging ideas, reading all you wanted to anyway, and instead I wasted it at Roosevelt."
"My countrymen have the right to shake my hand and talk to me if they so wish. Don't forget that their support and their reading of my works is what brought me the Nobel prize."
"My days I devote to reading and experiments in chemistry, and I spend many of the clear nights in the study of astronomy. There is, though I do not know how there is or why there is, a sense of infinite peace and protection in the glittering hosts of heaven. There it must be, I think, in the vast and eternal laws of matter, and not in the daily cares and sins and troubles of men, that whatever is more than animal within us must find its solace and its hope."
