Some Select Quotes on Reading and Books

     These are quotes that I gathered from conversations, books, articles, blogs, tv shows and even movies. Since I am not sure of the specific source, only the author, I apologize in advance if the context of the actual quote goes against the intention of this collection of quotes about books and readings.  I share them in the spirit of sparking thought and eliciting delight.  

I read books to read myself.

~Sven Birkerts~

A classic is a book people praise and don’t read.

~Mark Twain~

When I am reading a book, whether wise or silly, it seems to me to be alive and talking to me.

~Jonathan Swift~

No book is really worth reading at the age of ten which is not equally (and often far more) worth reading at the age of fifty and beyond.

~C.S. Lewis~

It is from books that wise men derive consolation in the troubles of life.

~Victor Hugo~

The end of reading is not more books but more life.

~Holbrook Jackson~

Of all the diversions of life, there is none so proper to fill up its empty spaces as the reading of useful and entertaining authors.

~Joseph Addison~

The bookshelf, like the book, has become an integral part of civilization as we know it, its presence in a home practically defining what it means to be civilized, educated, and refined.

~Henry Petroski~

The love of reading enables a man to exchange the wearisome hours of life, which come to every one, for hours of delight.

~Montesquieu~

When I am dead, I hope it will be said: his sins were scarlet, but, his books were read.

~Hilaire Belloc~

The mere brute pleasure of reading—the sort of pleasure a cow must have in grazing.

~G. K. Chesterton~

We use books like mirrors, gazing into them only to discover ourselves.

~Joseph Epstein~

If a book is worth reading, it is worth buying.

~John Ruskin~

A room without books is like a body without a soul.

~ Cicero~

Just the knowledge that a good book is waiting one at the end of a long day makes that day happier.

~Kathleen Norris~

The reading of all good books is like a conversation with the finest people of past centuries.

~Rene Descartes~

When you reread a classic you do not see more in the book than you did before; you see more in you than was there before.

~Clifton Fadiman~

Of making many books there is no end; and much study is a weariness of the flesh.

~Solomon~

The man who is fond of books is usually a man of lofty thought, and of elevated opinions.

~Christopher Dawson~

The man who does not read books has no advantage over the man who cannot read them.

~Mark Twain~

I cannot live without books.
~Thomas Jefferson~

Our high respect for a well-read person is praise enough for literature.

~Emerson~

The value of many men and books rests solely on their faculty for compelling all to seek out the most hidden and intimate things.

~Friedrich Nietzsche~

Force yourself to reflect on what you read, paragraph by paragraph.
~Samuel Taylor Coleridge~ 

Read in order to live.

~Gustave Flaubert~

Everywhere I have sought rest and not found it, except sitting in a corner by myself with a little book.

~Thomas a Kempis~

For books are not absolutely dead things, but do contain a potency of life in them to be as active as that soul was whose offspring they are; nay, they do preserve as in a vial the purest worth and extraction of that living intellect that bred them.

~John Milton~

Anyone who has a library and a garden wants for nothing.
~Cicero~

The classics guard the truths of the human heart from the faddish half-truths of the day by straightening the mind and imagination and enabling their readers to judge for themselves.

~Louis Cowan~

Quiet for oneself, surrounded by books—that is of all things most desirable.

~Erasmus~

Read the best books first, or you may not have a chance to read them at all.

~Thoreau~

Choose an author as you choose a friend.

~ Christopher Wren~

He who destroys a good book—kills reason itself.
~John Milton~

Take up and read, take up and read. 

~Augustine~ 

No matter what his rank or position may be, the lover of books is the richest and happiest of the children of men.

~John Alfred Langford~

Reading is a basic tool in the living of a good life.

~Mortimer Adler~

For the grand and inescapable tradition of western literary classics confronts us with fundamental choices over our understanding of words, reading and art, as well as citizenship, civilization, faith, and the whole notion of the true, the good, and the faithful.

~Os Guinness~

Books are the children of the brain.

~Jonathan Swift~

We read to know we are not alone.
~C.S. Lewis~

When you sell a man a book, you don’t sell him 12 ounces of paper and ink and glue—you sell him a whole new life.

~Christopher Morley~

After all manner of professors have done their best for us, the place we are to get knowledge is in books. The true university of these days is a collection of books.

~Thomas Carlyle~

The great books speak to us honor and love and sacrifice; but they do not always speak in familiar phrases.

~Louis Cowan~

A classic is a book that has never finished saying what it has to say.

~Italo Calvino~

The problem for me is that reading is, I won’t say a sacred, but nevertheless a pretty serious act.

~Joseph Epstein~

Literature is my Utopia.
~Helen Keller~