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Quotes about Books and Reading

Below read what some famous and not so famous people have to say about books and or reading. See if you agree or disagree...

When I get a little money I buy books;
and if any is left, I buy food and clothes.
Erasmus

Show me the books he loves and I shall know the man far better than through mortal friends.
~ Dawn Adams ~

Reading is to the mind what exercise is to the body.
~ Joseph Addison ~

Reading gives us someplace to go when we have to stay where we are.
Mason Cooley

Reading is a basic tool in the living of a good life.
~ Mortimer J. Adler ~

She is too fond of books, and it has turned her brain. (1873)
~ Louisa May Alcott ~

When I look back, I am so impressed again with the life-giving power of literature. If I were a young person today, trying to gain a sense of myself in the world, I would do that again by reading, just as I did when I was young.
~ Maya Angelou ~

"To learn to read is to light a fire;
every syllable that is spelled out is a spark."
— Victor Hugo, Les Miserables

Beware of the man of one book.
~ Thomas Aquinas ~

I am not a speed reader. I am a speed understander.
~ Isaac Asimov ~

Some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed,
and some few to be chewed and digested…
~ Francis Bacon ~

A book is a garden, an orchard, a storehouse, a party, a company by the way, a counselor, a multitude of counselors.
~ Henry Ward Beecher ~

A book is good company.
~ Henry Ward Beecher ~

Books are not men and yet they stay alive.
~ Stephen Vincent Benet ~

Books, I found, had the power to
make time stand still, retreat, or fly into the future.
~ Jim Bishop ~

I have always imagined that Paradise will be a kind of library.
Jorge Luis Borges

You don't have to burn books to destroy a culture. Just get people to stop reading them.
~ Ray Bradbury ~

The closest we will ever come to an orderly universe is a good library.
~ Ashleigh Brilliant ~

It is well to read everything of something, and something of everything.
~ Lord Henry P. Brougham ~

When I got [my] library card that was when my life began.
~ Rita Mae Brown ~

Children are made readers on the laps of their parents. (1994)
~ Emilie Buchwald ~

There is no past, so long as book shall live!
Edward Bulwer-Lytton.

To read without reflecting is like eating without digesting.
~ Edmund Burke ~

The oldest books are still only just out to
those who have not read them.
~ Samuel Butler ~

All that Mankind has done, thought, gained
or been-- it is lying as in magic preservation
in the pages of Books.
~ Thomas Carlyle ~

The best effect of any book is that it excites the reader
to self activity.
~ Thomas Carlyle ~

A good book is the purest essence of a human soul.
~ Thomas Carlyle ~

In books lies the soul of the whole past time.
~ Thomas Carlyle ~

What is the use of a book', thought Alice, 'without pictures or conversations?'
~ Lewis Carroll ~

There is no substitute for books in the life of a child. (1952)
~ Mary Ellen Chase ~

The mere brute pleasure of reading -- the sort of pleasure a cow must have in grazing.
~ Gilbert K. Chesterton ~

A book is like a garden carried in the pocket.
~ Chinese proverb ~

A room without books is like a body without a soul.
~ Marcus T. Cicero ~

I used to walk to school with my nose buried in a book.
~ Coolio ~

I often feel sorry for people who don't read good books; they are missing a chance to lead an extra life.
~ Scott Corbett ~

It was clear that the books owned the shop rather than the other way about. Everywhere they had run wild and taken possession of their habitat, breeding and multiplying and clearly lacking any strong hand to keep them down. (1963)
~ Agatha Christie ~

I heard his library burned down and both books were destroyed -- and one of them hadn't even been colored in yet.
~ John Dawkins ~

There is no Frigate like a Book To take us Lands away, Nor any Coursers like a Page Of prancing Poetry.
~ Emily Dickinson ~

There is more treasure in books than in
all the pirate's loot on Treasure Island.
~ Walt Disney ~

It is a great thing to start life with a small
number of really good books which are
your very own.
~ Sir Arthur Conan Doyle ~

Never judge a book by its movie.
~ J. W. Eagan ~

There is creative reading as well as creative writing.
~ Ralph Waldo Emerson ~

Read, read, read.
~ William Faulkner ~

Read in order to live.
~ Gustave Flaubert ~

The person who deserves most pity is a lonesome one on a rainy day who doesn't know how to read.
~ Benjamin Franklin ~

When I discovered libraries, it was like having Christmas every day.
~ Jean Fritz ~

Today a reader, tomorrow a leader.
~ W. Fusselman ~

I know every book of mine by its smell, and I have but to put my nose between the pages to be reminded of all sorts of things.
~ George Robert Gissing ~

Whenever they burn books they will also, in the end, burn human beings.
~ Heinrich Heine ~

These are not books, lumps of lifeless paper, but minds alive on the shelves.
~ Gilbert Highet ~

The newest books are those that never grow old.
~ George Holbrook Jackson ~

If you believe everything you read, better not read.
~ Japanese proverb ~

The end of reading is not more books but more life.
~ Holbrook Jackson ~

I am a part of everything that I have read.
~ John Kieran ~

The libraries have become my candy store.
~ Juliana Kimball ~

What is reading, but silent conversation.
~ Walter Savage Landor ~

Life happened because I turned the pages.
~ Alberto Manguel ~

The pleasure of reading is doubled when one lives
with another who shares the same books.
~ Katherine Mansfield ~

Outside a dog, a book is man's best friend. Inside a dog, it's too dark to read.
Groucho Marx

I've never known any trouble that an hour's reading didn't assuage.
~ Montesquieu ~

Wear the old coat and buy the new book.
~ Austin Phelps ~

A library should be like a pair of open arms.
~ Roger Rosenblat ~t

The more that you read, the more things you will know. The more that you learn, the more places you'll go.
~ Dr. Seuss ~

Reading is to the mind what exercise is to the body.
~ Richard Steele ~

Books--the children of the brain.
~ Jonathan Swift ~

My home is where my books are. (1909)
~ Ellen Thompson ~

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

A good book is the best of friends, the same today and forever.
~ Martin Farquhar Tupper ~

I was born with the impression that what happened in books was much more reasonable, and interesting, and real, in some ways, than what happened in life. (1980)
~ Anne Tyler ~

Books had instant replay long before televised sports.
~ Bert Williams ~

Fiction is like a spider's web, attached ever so lightly perhaps, but still attached to life at all four corners.
~ Virginia Woolf ~

I have often reflected upon the new vistas that
reading opened to me. I knew right there in
prison that reading had changed forever
the course of my life. As I see it today,
the ability to read awoke in me some long
dormant craving to be mentally alive.
~ Malcolm X ~

To read a writer is for me not merely to get an idea of what he says, but to go off with him, and travel in his company.
Andre Gride

I have lost all sense of home, having moved about so much. It means to me now--only that place where the books are kept.
John Steinbeck

I took a speed reading course and read 'war and peace' in twenty minutes. IT involves Russia.
- Woody Allen (Born 1935)

From the moment I picked your book up until I laid it down I was convulsed with laughter. Some day I intend reading it.
-- Groucho Marx (1895-1977)

I divide all readers into two classes: Those who read to remember and those who read to forget.
-- William Phelps

What is reading but silent conversation?
-- Walter Savage Lando

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