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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"I put a lot of stock in the written word, and the power of it. That's what I love about acting and reading scripts. Words are really powerful. I don't believe that axiom at all - words can absolutely hurt you. Words can wound. They can do a lot of damage. I think they can do way more damage than sticks and stones. I'll take sticks and stones."
"For a person who grew up in the '30s and '40s in the segregated South, with so many doors closed without explanation to me, libraries and books said, 'Here I am, read me.' Over time I have learned I am at my best around books."
"I go out of my way, but rather by license than carelessness.... It is the inattentive reader who loses my subject, not I. Some word about it will always be found off in a corner, which will not fail to be sufficient, though it takes little room."
"He that I am reading seems always to have the most force."
"I don't like watching myself on TV, I don't like reading about myself."
"If we consider men and women generally, and apart from their professions or occupations, there is only one situation I can think of in which they almost pull themselves up by their bootstraps, making an effort to read better than they usually do. When they are in love and are reading a love letter, they read for all they are worth."
"The dictionary also invites a playful reading. It challenges anyone to sit down with it in an idle moment. There are worse ways to kill time."
"A good book deserves an active reading. The activity of reading does not stop with the work of understanding what a book says. It must be completed by the work of criticism, the work of judging. The undemanding reader fails to satisfy this requirement, probably even more than he fails to analyze and interpret. He not only makes no effort to understand; he also dismisses a book simply by putting it aside and forgetting it. Worse than faintly praising it, he damns it by giving it no critical consideration whatever."
"We would be a lot safer if the Government would take its money out of science and put it into astrology and the reading of palms. I used to think that science would save us, and science certainly tried. But we can't stand any more tremendous explosions, either for or against democracy."
"The importance and influence of books on me has been cumulative: the result of hearing and reading lots of stories about interesting people and places."
"Reading is my greatest luxury."
"It should be possible to exist with only a short shelf of books, to read and give away. After all - we may not open a book, once read, for ten years or more. But the act of reading has made it part of us - to relinquish it would be to lose an extension of our being."
"Eating and reading are two pleasures that combine admirably."
"Ideally, we should like to define a good book as one which 'permits, invites, or compels' good reading"
"Many a man, brought up in the glib profession of some shallow form of Christianity, who comes through reading Astronomy to realize for the first time how majestically indifferent most reality is to man, and who perhaps abandons his religion on that account, may at that moment be having his first genuinely religious experience."
"Reading is my passion and my escape since I was 5 years old. Overall, children don't realize the magic that can live inside their own heads. Better even then any movie."
"I like reading in a pub rather than a library or study, as it's generally much easier to get a drink."
"Reading just had a great five-man move that involved everyone."
"I learned to write by reading the kind of books I wished I'd written."
"If someone does learn about the world from reading a novel of mine, that makes me very happy. It's probably not what brings me into the novel in the first place - I usually am pulled in by some big question about the world and human nature that I'm not going to resolve in the course of the novel. But I'm very devoted to getting my facts straight."
