Over 40,000 Famous Quotes Sorted By Topic and Author

Reading is to the mind, what exercise is to the body. As by the one, health is preserved, strengthened, and invigorated: by the other, virtue is kept alive, cherished, and confirmed.

Reading maketh a full man; conference a ready man; and writing an exact man.

And the Lord answered me, and said, Write the vision, and make it plain upon tables, that he may run that readeth it.

That he that readeth may run over it.

Read, mark, learn, and inwardly digest.

In science, read, by preference, the newest works; in literature, the oldest. The classic literature is always modern. - Edward George Earle Lytton Bulwer-Lytton, first Baron Lytton,

If time is precious, no book that will not improve by repeated readings deserves to be read at all.

We have not read an author till we have seen his object, whatever it may be, as he saw it.

The mind, relaxing into needful sport, Should turn to writers of an abler sort, Whose wit well managed, and whose classic style, Give truth a lustre, and make wisdom smile.

But truths on which depends our main concern, That 'tis our shame and misery not to learn, Shine by the side of every path we tread With such a lustre he that runs may read.

The delight of opening a new pursuit, or a new course of reading, imparts the vivacity and novelty of youth even to old age.

I like to be beholden to the great metropolitan English speech, the sea which receives tributaries from every region under heaven. I should as soon think of swimming across the Charles river when I wish to go to Boston, as of reading all my books in originals, when I have them rendered for me in my mother tongue.

Our high respect for a well-read man is praise enough for literature. - Ralph Waldo Emerson,

If we encountered a man or rare intellect, we should ask him what books he read. - Ralph Waldo Emerson,

My early and invincible love of reading, . . . I would not exchange for the treasures of India.

The sagacious reader who is capable of reading between these lines what does not stand written in them, but is nevertheless implied, will be able to form some conception.

What they're accustomed to is no great matter, But then, alas! they've read an awful deal.

In a polite age almost every person becomes a reader, and receives more instruction from the Press than the Pulpit.

The first time I read an excellent book, it is to me just as if I had gained a new friend. When I read a book over I have perused before, it resembles the meeting with an old one.

Books have always a secret influence on the understanding; we cannot at pleasure obliterate ideas: he that reads books of science, though without any desire fixed of improvement, will grow more knowing; he that entertains himself with moral or religious treatises, will imperceptibly advance in goodness; the ideas which are often offered to the mind, will at last find a lucky moment when it is disposed to receive them.