A good book can teach you about the world and about yourself. You learn more than how to read better; you also learn more about life. You become wiser. Not just more knowledgeable – books that provide nothing but information can produce that result. But wiser, in the sense that you are more deeply aware of the great and enduring truths of human life. Mortimer J Adler, How to Read a Book
The love of learning, the sequestered nooks,
And all the sweet serenity of books. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
Earth and sky, woods and fields, lakes and rivers, the mountain and the sea, are excellent schoolmasters, and teach some of us more than we can ever learn from books. John Lubbock
The bookful blockhead, ignorantly read,
With loads of learned lumber in his head. Alexander Pope, An Essay on Criticism, 1711
This irritated or puzzled such students of literature and their professors as were accustomed to ‘serious’ courses replete with ‘trends’ and ‘schools’ and ‘myths’ and ‘symbols’ and ‘social comment’ and something unspeakably spooky called ‘climate of thought’. Actually these ‘serious’ courses were quite easy ones with the students required to know not the books but about the books. Vladimir Nabokov
What a silly thing love is!’ said the student as he walked away. ‘It is not half as useful as logic, for it does not prove anything, and it is always telling one of things that are not going to happen, and making one believe things that are not true. In fact, it is quite unpractical, and, as in this age to be practical is everything, I shall go back to philosophy and study metaphysics.’
So he returned to his room and pulled out a great dusty book, and began to read. Oscar Wilde, The Nightingale and the Rose
There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written or badly written. Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray 1891 preface
The books that the world calls immoral are books that show the world its own shame. ibid.
It was a poisonous book. The heavy odour of incense seemed to cling about its pages and to trouble the brain. The mere cadence of the sentences, the subtle monotony of their music, so full as it was of complex refrains and movements elaborately repeated, produced in the mind of the lad, as he passed from chapter to chapter, a form of reverie, a malady of dreaming, that made him unconscious of the falling day and creeping shadows. ibid. ch10
I have rather studied books than men. Francis Bacon, A Letter of Advice ... to the Duke of Buckingham
Books must follow sciences, and not sciences books. Francis Bacon
Books are not absolutely dead things, but do contain a potency of life in them to be as active as that soul was whose progeny they are; nay they do preserve as in a vial the purest efficacy and extraction of that living intellect that bred them. John Milton, Areopagitica 1644
As good almost kill a man as kill a good book: who kills a man kills a reasonable creature, God’s image; but he who destroys a good book, kills reason itself, kills the image of God, as it were in the eye. ibid.
A good book is the precious life-blood of a master spirit, embalmed and treasured up on purpose to a life beyond life. ibid.
Who reads
Incessantly, and to his reading brings not
A spirit and judgement equal or superior
(And what he brings, what needs he elsewhere seek?)
Uncertain and unsettled still remains,
Deep-versed in books and shallow in himself. John Milton, Paradise Regained 4:322
I find television very educating. Every time somebody turns on the set, I go into the other room and read a book. Groucho Marx
From the moment I picked your book up until I laid it down, I convulsed with laughter. Someday I intend on reading it. Groucho Marx
Outside of a dog, a book is a man’s best friend. Inside of a dog it’s too hard to read. Groucho Marx
From the moment I picked up your book until I laid it down I was convulsed with laughter. Some day I intend reading your book. Groucho Marx
What really knocks me out is a book that, when you’re all done reading it, you wish the author that wrote it was a terrific friend of yours and you could call him up on the phone whenever you felt like it. That doesn’t happen much, though. J D Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye
My alma mater was books, a good library ... I could spend the rest of my life reading, just satisfying my curiosity. Malcolm X
Books to the ceiling,
Books to the sky,
My pile of books is a mile high.
How I love them! How I need them!
I’ll have a long beard by the time I read them. Arnold Lobel
It’s not that I don't like people. It’s just that when I’m in the company of others – even my nearest and dearest – there always comes a moment when I’d rather be reading a book. Maureen Corrigan, Leave Me Alone, I’m Reading: Finding and Losing Myself in Books
We read books to find out who we are. What other people, real or imaginary, do and think and feel ... is an essential guide to our understanding of what we ourselves are and may become. Ursula K Le Guin
Why can’t people just sit and read books and be nice to each other? David Baldacci, The Camel Club
Despite the enormous quantity of books, how few people read! And if one reads profitably, one would realize how much stupid stuff the vulgar herd is content to swallow every day. Voltaire
Fools have a habit of believing that everything written by a famous author is admirable. For my part I read only to please myself and like only what suits my taste. Voltaire, Candide
I have a passion for teaching kids to become readers, to become comfortable with a book, not daunted. Books shouldn’t be daunting, they should be funny, exciting and wonderful; and learning to be a reader gives a terrific advantage. Roald Dahl
By now, it is probably very late at night, and you have stayed up to read this book when you should have gone to sleep. If this is the case, then I commend you for falling into my trap. It is a writer’s greatest pleasure to hear that someone was kept up until the unholy hours of the morning reading one of his books. It goes back to authors being terrible people who delight in the suffering of others. Plus, we get a kickback from the caffeine industry. Brandon Sanderson, Alcatraz Versus the Evil Librarians
One glance at a book and you hear the voice of another person, perhaps someone dead for 1,000 years. To read is to voyage through time. Carl Sagan
The trick is to know which books to read. Carl Sagan & Ann Druyan, Cosmos: The Persistence of Memory, PBS 1980
Books break the shackles of time. A book is proof humans can work magic. ibid.
A book is made from a tree. It is an assemblage of flat, flexible parts (still called ‘leaves’) imprinted with dark pigmented squiggles. One glance at it and you hear the voice of another person, perhaps someone dead for thousands of years. Across the millennia, the author is speaking, clearly and silently, inside your head, directly to you. Writing is perhaps the greatest of human inventions, binding together people, citizens of distant epochs, who never knew one another. Books break the shackles of time – proof that humans can work magic. Carl Sagan
Read the best books first, or you may not have a chance to read them at all. Henry David Thoreau, A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers
A written word is the choicest of relics. It is something at once more intimate with us and more universal than any other work of art. It is the work of art nearest to life itself. It may be translated into every language, and not only be read but actually breathed from all human lips; – not be represented on canvas or in marble only, but be carved out of the breath of life itself. Henry David Thoreau, Walden
Let others pride themselves about how many pages they have written; I’d rather boast about the ones I’ve read. Jorge Luis Borges