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

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.

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

I am not a speed reader. I am a speed understander.

He had read much, if one considers his long life; but his contemplation was much more than his reading. He was wont to say that if he had read as much as other men he should have known no more than other men.

To feel most beautifully alive means to be reading something beautiful, ready always to apprehend in the flow of language the sudden flash of poetry.

Books are men of higher stature; the only men that speak aloud for future times to hear.

The printing press is either the greatest blessing or the greatest curse of modern times, sometimes one forgets which it is.

He that loves a book will never want a faithful friend, a wholesome counselor, a cheerful companion, an effectual comforter. By study, by reading, by thinking, one may innocently divert and pleasantly entertain himself, as in all weathers, as in all fortunes.

The world may be full of fourth-rate writers but it's also full of fourth-rate readers.

Hypocrite reader -- my fellow -- my brother!

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

Books are not men and yet they stay alive.

The power of a text is different when it is read from when it is copied out. Only the copied text thus commands the soul of him who is occupied with it, whereas the mere reader never discovers the new aspects of his inner self that are opened by the text, that road cut through the interior jungle forever closing behind it: because the reader follows the movement of his mind in the free flight of day-dreaming, whereas the copier submits it to command.

All the best stories in the world are but one story in reality -- the story of escape. It is the only thing which interests us all and at all times, how to escape.

I read the newspaper avidly. It is my one form of continuous fiction.

Reading is not a duty, and has consequently no business to be made disagreeable.

A conventional good read is usually a bad read, a relaxing bath in what we know already. A true good read is surely an act of innovative creation in which we, the readers, become conspirators.

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

There are worse crimes than burning books. One of them is not reading them.

It is well to read everything of something, and something of everything.

Books, books, books had found the secret of a garret-room piled high with cases in my father's name; Piled high, packed large, --where, creeping in and out among the giant fossils of my past, like some small nimble mouse between the ribs of a mastodon, I nibbled here and there at this or that box, pulling through the gap, in heats of terror, haste, victorious joy, the first book first. And how I felt it beat under my pillow, in the morning's dark. An hour before the sun would let me read! My books!

Books are masters who instruct us without rods or ferules, without words or anger, without bread or money. If you approach them, they are not asleep; if you seek them, they do not hide; if you blunder, they do not scold; if you are ignorant, they do not laugh at you.

Surviving and thriving as a professional today demands two new approaches to the written word. First, it requires a new approach to orchestrating information, by skillfully choosing what to read and what to ignore. Second, it requires a new approach to integrating information, by reading faster and with greater comprehension.

A novel is never anything, but a philosophy put into images.

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.

The novel can't compete with cars, the movies, television, and liquor. A guy who's had a good feed and tanked up on good wine gives his old lady a kiss after supper and his day is over. Finished.

Books are standing counselors and preachers, always at hand, and always disinterested; having this advantage over oral instructors, that they are ready to repeat their lesson as often as we please.

Books are the blessed chloroform of the mind.

A good title is the title of a successful book.

The flood of print has turned reading into a process of gulping rather than savoring

Let blockheads read what blockheads wrote.

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

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

Perhaps there are none more lazy, or more truly ignorant, than your everlasting readers.

Books are but waste paper unless we spend in action the wisdom we get from thought -- asleep. When we are weary of the living, we may repair to the dead, who have nothing of peevishness, pride, or design in their conversation.

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

The book salesman should be honored because he brings to our attention, as a rule, the very books we need most and neglect most.

You are wise, witty and wonderful, but you spend too much time reading this sort of stuff.

The successful Accelerated Reader is able to read larger than normal "blocks" or "bites" of the printed page with each eye stop. He has accepted, without reservation, the philosophy that the most important benefit of reading is the gaining of information, ideas, mental "picture" and entertainment-not the fretting over words. He has come to the realization that words in and of themselves are for the most part insignificant.

The great American novel has not only already been written, it has already been rejected.

Next, in importance to books are their titles.

If I had my way books would not be written in English, but in an exceedingly difficult secret language that only skilled professional readers and story-tellers could interpret. Then people like you would have to go to public halls and pay good prices to hear the professionals decode and read the books aloud for you. This plan would have the advantage of scaring off all amateur authors, retired politicians, country doctors and I-Married-a-Midget writers who would not have the patience to learn the secret language.

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

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

The world of books is the most remarkable creation of man nothing else that he builds ever lasts monuments fall; nations perish; civilization grow old and die out; new races build others. But in the world of books are volumes that have seen this happen again and again and yet live on. Still young, still as fresh as the day they were written, still telling men's hearts, of the hearts of men centuries dead.

There is an art of reading, as well as an art of thinking, and an art of writing.

Never judge a book by its movie.

Readers are less and less seen as mere non-writers, the subhuman "other" or flawed derivative of the author; the lack of a pen is no longer a shameful mark of secondary status but a positively enabling space, just as within every writer can be seen to lurk, as a repressed but contaminating antithesis, a reader.

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

There is creative reading as well as creative writing.

If the riches of the Indies, or the crowns of all the kingdom of Europe, were laid at my feet in exchange for my love of reading, I would spurn them all.

There is a set of religious, or rather moral, writings which teach that virtue is the certain road to happiness, and vice to misery in this world. A very wholesome and comfortable doctrine, and to which we have but one objection, namely, that it is not true.

Read in order to live.

Read much, but not many books.

A house is not a home unless it contains food and fire for the mind as well as the body.

Today a reader, tomorrow a leader.

When you have mastered numbers, you will in fact no longer be reading numbers, any more than you read words when reading books You will be reading meanings.

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.

The first time I read an excellent work, it is to me just as if I gained a new friend; and when I read over a book I have perused before, it resembles the meeting of an old one.

Learning to read has been reduced to a process of mastering a series of narrow, specific, hierarchical skills. Where armed-forces recruits learn the components of a rifle or the intricacies of close order drill "by the numbers," recruits to reading learn its mechanics sound by sound and word by word.

I have read your book and much like it.

The greatest gift is the passion for reading. It is cheap, it consoles, it distracts, it excites, it gives you knowledge of the world and experience of a wide kind. It is a moral illumination.

Books give not wisdom where none was before. But where some is, there reading makes it more.

The best of a book is not the thought which it contains, but the thought which it suggests; just as the charm of music dwells not in the tones but in the echoes of our hearts.

The books we read should be chosen with great care, that they may be, as an Egyptian king wrote over his library, "The medicines of the soul."

A book might be written on the injustice of the just.

Books in a large university library system: 2,000,000. Books in an average large city library: 10,000. Average number of books in a chain booksto!0,000. Books in an average neighborhood branch library: 20,000.

The newest books are those that never grow old.

Read as you taste fruit or savor wine, or enjoy friendship, love or life.

Books constitute capital. A library book lasts as long as a house, for hundreds of years. It is not, then, an article of mere consumption but fairly of capital, and often in the case of professional men, setting out in life, it is their only capital.

Tradition is but a meteor, which, if it once falls, cannot be rekindled. Memory, once interrupted, is not to be recalled. But written learning is a fixed luminary, which, after the cloud that had hidden it has passed away, is again bright in its proper station. So books are faithful repositories, which may be awhile neglected or forgotten, but when opened again, will again impart instruction.

Books that you carry to the fire, and hold readily in your hand, are most useful after all.

Books like friends, should be few and well-chosen.

The worst thing about new books is that they keep us from reading the old ones.

The Bible remained for me a book of books, still divine -- but divine in the sense that all great books are divine which teach men how to live righteously.

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

I am a part of everything that I have read.

A bad book is the worse that it cannot repent. It has not been the devil's policy to keep the masses of mankind in ignorance; but finding that they will read, he is doing all in his power to poison their books.

You can either read something many times in order to be assured that you got it all, or else you can define your purpose and use techniques which will assure that you have met it and gotten what you need.

Borrowers of books --those mutilators of collections, spoilers of the symmetry of shelves, and creators of odd volumes.

What is reading, but silent conversation.

After all, the world is not a stage -- not to me: nor a theatre: nor a show-house of any sort. And art, especially novels, are not little theatres where the reader sits aloft and watches... and sighs, commiserates, condones and smiles. That's what you want a book to be: because it leaves you so safe and superior, with your two-dollar ticket to the show. And that's what my books are not and never will be. Whoever reads me will be in the thick of the scrimmage, and if he doesn't like it -- if he wants a safe seat in the audience -- let him read someone else.

Until I feared I would lose it, I never loved to read. One does not love breathing.

You've really got to start hitting the books because it's no joke out here.

For a good book has this quality, that it is not merely a petrifaction of its author, but that once it has been tossed behind, like Deucalion's little stone, it acquires a separate and vivid life of its own.

I feel like I'm drowning. Every night, I'm carrying home loads of things to read but I'm too exhausted. I keep clipping things and Xeroxing them and planning to read them eventually, but I just end up throwing it all away and feeling guilty.

A book is a mirror: If an ass peers into it, you can't expect an apostle to look out.

For books are more than books, they are the life, the very heart and core of ages past, the reason why men lived and worked and died, the essence and quintessence of their lives.

In science, read by preference the newest works. In literature, read the oldest. The classics are always modern.

A novel must be exceptionally good to live as long as the average cat.

Everything in the world exists to end up in a book.

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

Once we have learned to read, meaning of words can somehow register without consciousness.

Readers are plentiful: thinkers are rare.

The book to read is not the one which thinks for you, but the one which makes you think. No book in the world equals the Bible for that.

Any book that helps a child to form a habit of reading, to make reading one of his deep and continuing needs, is good for him.

There are people who read too much: bibliobibuli. I know some who are constantly drunk on books, as other men are drunk on whiskey or religion. They wander through this most diverting and stimulating of worlds in a haze, seeing nothing and hearing nothing.

Until it is kindled by a spirit as flamingly alive as the one which gave it birth a book is dead to us. Words divested of their magic are but dead hieroglyphs.

Deep versed in books and shallow in himself.

Books and marriage go ill together.

Some of the most famous books are the least worth reading. Their fame was due to their having done something that needed to be doing in their day. The work is done and the virtue of the book has expired.

A dose of poison can do its work but once. A bad book can go on poisoning minds for generations.

A bibliophile of little means is likely to suffer often. Books don't slip from his hands but fly past him through the air, high as birds, high as prices.

The books that help you most are those which make you think that most. The hardest way of learning is that of easy reading; but a great book that comes from a great thinker is a ship of thought, deep freighted with truth and beauty.

The last thing one discovers in composing a work is what to put first.

Five daily newspapers arrive in my California driveway. The New York times and the Wall Street Journal are supplemented by three local papers. As for magazines, I read, or at least skim, Business Week, Forbes, The Economist, INC; Industry Week, Fortune. Other subscriptions include Sales and Marketing Management, Modern Health Care, Progressive Grocer, High Tech Business, and Slaon Management Review from MIT. I religiously read Business Tokyo, Asia Week, and Far Eastern Economic Review. I glance at Newsweek and Time ... but I devour the New Republic, Policy Review, Foreign Affairs, The Washington Monthly, and Public Interest. How about books? A dozen or more each month.

No one can read with profit that which he cannot learn to read with pleasure.

The more sins you confess, the more books you will sell.

This book fills a much-needed gap.

She could give herself up to the written word as naturally as a good dancer to music or a fine swimmer to water. The only difficulty was that after finishing the last sentence she was left with a feeling at once hollow and uncomfortably full. Exactly like indigestion.

Reading makes immigrants of us all. It takes us away from home, but more important, it finds homes for us everywhere.

Upon books the collective education of the race depends; they are the sole instruments of registering, perpetuating and transmitting thought.

Everything you need for better future and success has already been written. And guess what? All you have to do is go to the library.

The reason that fiction is more interesting than any other form of literature, to those who really like to study people, is that in fiction the author can really tell the truth without humiliating himself.

Very young children eat their books, literally devouring their contents. This is one reason for the scarcity of first editions of Alice in Wonderland and other favorites of the nursery.

Prerequisite for rereadability in books: that they be forgettable.

The real risks for any artist are taken in pushing the work to the limits of what is possible, in the attempt to increase the sum of what it is possible to think. Books become good when they go to this edge and risk falling over it --when they endanger the artist by reason of what he has, or has not, artistically dared.

Be sure that you go to the author to get at his meaning, not to find yours.

To use books rightly, is to go to them for help; to appeal to them when our own knowledge and power fail; to be led by them into wider sight and purer conception than our own, and to receive from them the united sentence of the judges and councils of all time, against our solitary and unstable opinions.

A library is thought in cold storage.

I am what libraries and librarians have made me, with little assistance from a professor of Greek and poets.

Books are like a mirror. If an ass looks in, you can't expect an angel to look out.

I've never know any trouble than an hour's reading didn't assuage.

Don't ask me who's influenced me. A lion is made up of the lambs he's digested, and I've been reading all my life.

How can you dare teach a man to read until you've taught him everything else first?

What is the most precious, the most exciting smell awaiting you in the house when you return to it after a dozen years or so? The smell of roses, you think? No, moldering books.

People say that life is the thing, but I prefer reading.

Only a generation of readers will span a generation of writers.

Why pay a dollar for a bookmark? Why not use the dollar for a bookmark?

A great book should leave you with many experiences and slightly exhausted at the end. You should live several lives while reading it.

Most books, like their authors, are born to die; of only a few books can it be said that death has no dominion over them; they live, and their influence lives forever.

Books, like proverbs, receive their chief value from the stamp and esteem of the ages through which they have passed

What is a diary as a rule? A document useful to the person who keeps it. Dull to the contemporary who reads it and invaluable to the student, centuries afterwards, who treasures it.

Books, not which afford us a cowering enjoyment, but in which each thought is of unusual daring; such as an idle man cannot read, and a timid one would not be entertained by, which even make us dangerous to existing institution --such call I good books.

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

The Brahmins say that in their books there are many predictions of times in which it will rain. But press those books as strongly as you can, you can not get out of them a drop of water. So you can not get out of all the books that contain the best precepts the smallest good deed.

No matter how busy you may think you are, you must find time for reading, or surrender yourself to self-chosen ignorance.

Education... has produced a vast population able to read but unable to distinguish what is worth reading, an easy prey to sensations and cheap appeals.

One half who graduate from college never read another book.

There are books so alive that you're always afraid that while you weren't reading, the book has gone and changed, has shifted like a river; while you went on living, it went on living too, and like a river moved on and moved away. No one has stepped twice into the same river. But did anyone ever step twice into the same book?

My books are water; those of the great geniuses are wine -- everybody drinks water.

Ideally a book would have no order to it, and the reader would have to discover his own.

Fiction reveals truth that reality obscures.

Camerado! This is no book; who touches this touches a man.

Books had instant replay long before televised sports.

Old books that have ceased to be of service should no more be abandoned than should old friends who have ceased to give pleasure.

Choose an author as you choose a friend.

Man ceased to be an ape, vanquished the ape, on the day the first book was written.