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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"If the entire week is a battlefield, reading the Bible is sort of like that parachute with the box of reserves that come in the middle of the war: food and water and the toothbrush and toilet paper."
"If one wanted to depict the whole thing graphically, every episode, with its climax, would require a three-dimensional, or, rather, no model: every experience is unrepeatable. What makes lovemaking and reading resemble each other most is that within both of them times and spaces open, different from measurable time and space."
"It's better not to know authors personally, because the real person never corresponds to the image you form of him from reading his books."
"It does not follow because many books are written by persons born in America that there exists an American literature. Books which imitate or represent the thoughts and life of Europe do not constitute an American literature. Before such can exist, an original idea must animate this nation and fresh currents of life must call into life fresh thoughts along the shore."
"I loved the material when I first read it, and the experience of making the film was a great one. So when we came around to complete the trilogy, I just signed on board without even reading the scripts because the experience of the first film was so good."
"Once I start reading something, I can't stop. I obsessively read, which is a problem with long books!"
"How can you dare teach a man to read until you've taught him everything else first?"
"The golden rule when reading the menu is, if you cannot pronounce it, you cannot afford it."
"As Commander-in-Chief, I take pleasure in commending the reading of the Bible to all who serve in the Armed Forces of the United States. Throughout the centuries, men of many faiths and diverse origins have found in the Sacred Book words of wisdom, counsel, and inspiration. It is a fountain of strength...an aid in attaining the highest aspiration of the human soul."
"The Southern slave would obey God in respect to marriage, and also to the reading and studying of His word. But this, as we have seen, is forbidden him."
"What a glorious garden of wonders the lights of Broadway would be to anyone lucky enough to be unable to read."
"Seven actors have played Batman on the big screen, and if you can name all seven without reading any further, your youth has been wasted."
"Reading was such an enrichment of my life. And it was that pleasure that I had as a very young reader probably that is the origin of my vocation."
"The demand that I make of my reader is that he should devote his whole Life to reading my works."
"A book should contain pure discoveries, glimpses of terra firma, though by shipwrecked mariners, and not the art of navigation by those who have never been out of sight of land."
"Books must be read as deliberately and reservedly as they were written."
"Books can only reveal us to ourselves, and as often as they do us this service we lay them aside."
"In Homer and Chaucer there is more of the innocence and serenity of youth than in the more modern and moral poets. The Iliad is not Sabbath but morning reading, and men cling to this old song, because they still have moments of unbaptized and uncommitted life, which give them an appetite for more."
"I like reading, writing, hiking, camping, free running, surfing, rock climbing, long boarding, and so much more."
"With this book in my hands, reading aloud to my friends, questioning them, explaining to them, I was made clearly to understand that I had no friends, that I was alone in the world. Because in not understanding the meaning of the words, neither I nor my friends, one thing became very clear and that was that there were ways of not understanding and that the difference between the non-understanding of one individual and the non-understanding of another created a world of terra firma even more solid than differences of understanding."
