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There is no robber worse than a bad book.
-Italian Proverb
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A wicked book cannot repent.
-Proverb
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The more sins you confess, the more books you will sell.
-Proverb
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With Shakespeare and poetry, a new world was born. New dreams, new desires, a self consciousness was born. I desired to know to know myself in terms of the new standards set by these books.
-Peter Henry Abrahams, Tell Freedom, 1954
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Authors have established it as a kind of rule, that a man ought to be dull sometimes; as the most severe reader makes allowances for many rests and nodding places in a voluminous writer.
-Joseph Addison, "The Spectator", July 23, 1711
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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
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In the case of good books, the point is not how many of them you can get through, but rather how many can get through to you.
-Mortimer J. Adler
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Reading is a basic tool in the living of a good life.
-Mortimer J. Adler
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That is a good book which is opened with expectation, and closed with delight and profit.
-Amos Bronson Alcott
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Beware of the person of one book.
-Thomas Aquinas
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I am not a speed reader. I am a speed understander.
-Isaac Asimov
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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.
-John Aubrey
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A real book is not one that we read, but one that reads us.
-W. H. Auden
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Some books are undeservedly forgotten; none are undeservedly remembered.
-W. H. Auden
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I declare after all there is no enjoyment like reading! How much sooner one tires of anything than of a book! When I have a house of my own, I shall be miserable if I have not an excellent library.
-Jane Austen
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Everything in this book may be wrong. The Savior's Manual
-Richard Bach
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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.
-Gaston Bachelard
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Read not to contradict and confute; nor to believe and take for granted; nor to find talk and discourse; but to weigh and consider.
-Francis Bacon
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Read not to contradict and confute, not to believe and take for granted, not to find talk and discourse, but to weigh and consider. Some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested: that is, some books are to be read only in parts, others to be read, but not curiously, and some few to be read wholly, and with diligence and attention.
-Francis Bacon, Essays, Of Studies
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Footnotes are the finer-suckered surfaces that allow testicular paragraphs to hold fast to the wider reality of the library.
-Nicholson Baker
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When the book comes out it may hurt you -- but in order for me to do it, it had to hurt me first. I can only tell you about yourself as much as I can face about myself.
-James Baldwin
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He has only half learned the art of reading who has not added to it the more refined art of skipping and skimming.
-Arthur Balfour
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Books are men of higher stature; the only men that speak aloud for future times to hear.
-E.S. Barrett
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The printing press is either the greatest blessing or the greatest curse of modern times, sometimes one forgets which it is.
-James Barrie
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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.
-Barrow
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The world may be full of fourth-rate writers but it's also full of fourth-rate readers.
-Stan Barstow
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Hypocrite reader -- my fellow -- my brother!
-Charles Baudelaire
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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
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Books are not made for furniture, but there is nothing else that so beautifully furnishes a house.
-Henry Ward Beecher
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Where is human nature so weak as in the bookstore?
-Henry Ward Beecher
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Books are not men and yet they stay alive.
-Stephen Vincent Benet
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Of all the ways of acquiring books, writing them oneself is regarded as the most praiseworthy method. Writers are really people who write books not because they are poor, but because they are dissatisfied with the books which they could buy but do not like.
-Walter Benjamin
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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.
-Walter Benjamin
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Does there, I wonder, exist a being who has read all, or approximately all, that the person of average culture is supposed to have read, and that not to have read is a social sin? If such a being does exist, surely he is an old, a very old man.
-Arnold Bennett, The Journals of Arnold Bennett, 1932.
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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.
-Arthur Christopher Benson
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When we read a story, we inhabit it. The covers of the book are like a roof and four walls. What is to happen next will take place within the four walls of the story. And this is possible because the story's voice makes everything its own.
-John Berger
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I read the newspaper avidly. It is my one form of continuous fiction.
-Aneurin Bevan
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An ordinary man can surround himself with two thousand books and thenceforward have at least one place in the world in which it is possible to be happy.
-Augustine Birrell
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Reading is not a duty, and has consequently no business to be made disagreeable.
-Augustine Birrell
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Books, I found, had the power to make time stand still, retreat or fly into the future.
-Jim Bishop, A Bishop's Confession, 1981
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Read nothing that you do not care to remember, and remember nothing you do not mean to use.
-Professor Blackie
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The failure to read good books both enfeebles the vision and strengthens our most fatal tendency --the belief that the here and now is all there is.
-Allan Bloom
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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.
-Malcolm Bradbury
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You don't have to burn books to destroy a culture. Just get people to stop reading them.
-Ray Bradbury, "Reader's Digest", January, 1994
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There are worse crimes than burning books. One of them is not reading them.
-Joseph Brodsky, At press conference, Washington, D.C., on acceptance of U.S. poet laureateship. Quoted in: Independent on Sunday (London), May 19, 1991
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A book may be compared to your neighbor: if it be good, it cannot last too long; if bad, you cannot get rid of it too early.
-Rupert Brooke
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The lessons taught in great books are misleading. The commerce in life is rarely so simple and never so just.
-Anita Brookner
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It is well to read everything of something, and something of everything.
-Lord Henry P. Brougham
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Begin to read a book that will help you move toward your dream.
-Les Brown
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There are mystically in our faces certain characters which carry in them the motto of our souls, wherein he that cannot read A, B, C may read our natures.
-Sir Thomas Browne
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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!
-Elizabeth Barrett Browning
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Books succeed, and lives fail.
-Elizabeth Barrett Browning
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When a book raises your spirit, and inspires you with noble and manly thoughts, seek for no other test of its excellence. It is good, and made by a good workman.
-Jean De La Bruyere
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Read Homer once, and you can read no more. For all books else appear so mean, and so poor. Verse will seem prose; but still persist to read, and Homer will be all the books you need.
-Duke of Buckingham
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Reading without purpose is sauntering not exercise.
-Edward George Bulwer-Lytton
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In science read the newest works, in literature read the oldest.
-Edward George Bulwer-Lytton
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Americans will listen, but they do not care to read. War and Peace must wait for the leisure of retirement, which never really comes: meanwhile it helps to furnish the living room. Blockbusting fiction is bought as furniture. Unread, it maintains its value. Read, it looks like money wasted. Cunningly, Americans know that books contain a person, and they want the person, not the book.
-Anthony Burgess
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The possession of a book becomes a substitute for reading it.
-Anthony Burgess
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When the printing press was developed in the fifteenth century it was said that printed books would make reading and writing the infatuation of people who have no business reading and writing.
-James Burke, The Knowledge Web, ch.1
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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.
-Richard De Bury
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The oldest books are still only just out to those who have not read them.
-Samuel Butler
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The reading or non-reading a book will never keep down a single petticoat.
-Lord (George Gordon) Byron
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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.
-Jimmy Calano
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A novel is never anything, but a philosophy put into images.
-Albert Camus
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A novel points out that the world consists entirely of exceptions.
-Joyce Carey
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The best effect of any book, is that it excites the reader to self-activity.
-Thomas Carlyle
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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
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If a book comes from the heart it will contrive to reach other hearts. All art and author craft are of small account to that.
-Thomas Carlyle
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Reading a book is like re-writing it for yourself. You bring to a novel, anything you read, all your experience of the world. You bring your history and you read it in your own terms.
-Angela Carter
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A good book, in the language of the book-sellers, is a salable one; in that of the curious, a scarce one; in that of men of sense, a useful and instructive one.
-Oswald Chambers
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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.
-Oswald Chambers
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Books are the blessed chloroform of the mind.
-Robert Chambers
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Most books today seemed to have been written overnight from books read the day before.
-Sebastian Roch Nicolas Chamfort
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At least half the mystery novels published violate the law that the solution, once revealed, must seem to be inevitable.
-Raymond Chandler
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A good title is the title of a successful book.
-Raymond Chandler
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God be thanked for books; they are the voices of the distant and the dead, and make us heirs of the spiritual life of past ages.
-William Ellery Channing
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Every man is a volume if you know how to read him.
-William Ellery Channing
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It is chiefly through books that we enjoy the communion with superior minds. In the best books, authors talk to us, give us their most precious thoughts, and pour their souls into ours. God be thanked for books.
-William Ellery Channing
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The flood of print has turned reading into a process of gulping rather than savoring
-Warren Chappell
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Let blockheads read what blockheads wrote.
-Lord Chesterfield
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Buy good books, and read them; the best books are the commonest, and the last editions are always the best, if the editors are not blockheads.
-Lord Chesterfield
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The mere brute pleasure of reading --the sort of pleasure a cow must have in grazing.
-G. K. Chesterton
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A good novel tells us the truth about its hero; but a bad novel tells us the truth about its author.
-G. K. Chesterton
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A book is the only immortality.
-Rufus Choate
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Happy is he who has laid up in his youth, and held fast in all fortune, a genuine and passionate love for reading.
-Rufus Choate
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A room without books is like a body without a soul.
-Marcus Tullius Cicero
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Many books require no thought from those who read them, and for a very simple reason: they made no such demand upon those who wrote them. Those works, therefore, are the most valuable, that set our thinking faculties in the fullest operation. understand them.
-Clarendon
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Perhaps there are none more lazy, or more truly ignorant, than your everlasting readers.
-William Cobbett
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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.
-Jeremy Collier
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Next to acquiring good friends, the best acquisition is that of good books.
-Charles Caleb Colton
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Books, like friends, should be few and well chosen. Like friends, too, we should return to them again and again for, like true friends, they will never fail us -- never cease to instruct -- never cloy.
-Charles Caleb Colton
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A person of mature years and ripe development, who is expecting nothing from literature but the corroboration and renewal of past ideas, may find satisfaction in a lucidity so complete as to occasion no imaginative excitement, but young and ambitious students are not content with it. They seek the excitement because they are capable of the growth that it accompanies.
-Charles Horton Cooley
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The book salesman should be honored because he brings to our attention, as a rule, the very books we need most and neglect most.
-Frank Crane
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You are wise, witty and wonderful, but you spend too much time reading this sort of stuff.
-Jim Critchfield
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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.
-Wade E. Cutler
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A good book is the very essence of a good man. His virtues survive in it, while the foibles and faults of his actual life are forgotten. All the goodly company of the excellent and great sit around my table, or look down on me from yonder shelves, waiting patiently to answer my questions and enrich me with their wisdom. A precious book is a foretaste of immortality.
-Theodore L. Cuyler
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The great American novel has not only already been written, it has already been rejected.
-Frank Dane
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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.
-Robertson Davies
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I heard his library burned down and both books were destroyed -- and one of them hadn't even been colored in yet.
-John Dawkins
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The man who is fond of books is usually a man of lofty thought, and of elevated opinions.
-Christopher Dawson
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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.
-Clarence Day
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Books should to one of these fours ends conduce, for wisdom, piety, delight, or use.
-Sir John Denham
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The reading of all good books is indeed like a conversation with the noblest men of past centuries who were the authors of them, nay a carefully studied conversation, in which they reveal to us none but the best of their thoughts.
-Rene Descartes
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There are books of which the backs and covers are by far the best parts.
-Charles Dickens
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There is no Frigate like a book to take us lands away nor any coursers like a page of prancing Poetry.
-Emily Dickinson
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He ate and drank the precious Words, his Spirit grew robust; He knew no more that he was poor, nor that his frame was Dust.
-Emily Dickinson
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There is more treasure in books than in all the pirates loot on Treasure Island and best of all, you can enjoy these riches every day of your life.
-Walt Disney
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Books are fatal: they are the curse of the human race. Nine-tenths of existing books are nonsense, and the clever books are the refutation of that nonsense. The greatest misfortune that ever befell man was the invention of printing.
-Benjamin Disraeli
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Nine-tenths of the existing books are nonsense and the clever books are the refutation of that nonsense.
-Benjamin Disraeli
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There is an art of reading, as well as an art of thinking, and an art of writing.
-Isaac Disraeli
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You will, I am sure, agree with me that... if page 534 only finds us in the second chapter, the length of the first one must have been really intolerable.
-Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
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Never judge a book by its movie.
-J. W. Eagan
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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.
-Terry Eagleton
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The good of a book lies in its being read. A book is made up of signs that speak of other signs, which in their turn speak of things. Without an eye to read them, a book contains signs that produce no concepts; therefore it is dumb.
-Umberto Eco
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We should be as careful of the books we read, as of the company we keep. The dead very often have more power than the living.
-Tryon Edwards
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No story is the same to us after a lapse of time; or rather we who read it are no longer the same interpreters.
-George Eliot
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If we encounter a man of rare intellect, we should ask him what books he reads.
-Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Never read any book that is not a year old.
-Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Our high respect for a well read person is praise enough for literature.
-Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Books are the best of things if well used; if abused, among the worst. They are good for nothing but to inspire. I had better never see a book than be warped by its attraction clean out of my own orbit, and made a satellite instead of a system.
-Ralph Waldo Emerson
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'Tis the good reader that makes the good book; in every book he finds passages which seem to be confidences or sides hidden from all else and unmistakably meant for his ear; the profit of books is according to the sensibility of the reader; the profound thought or passion sleeps as in a mine, until it is discovered by an equal mind and heart.
-Ralph Waldo Emerson
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We are too civil to books. For a few golden sentences we will turn over and actually read a volume of four or five hundred pages.
-Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Some books leave us free and some books make us free.
-Ralph Waldo Emerson
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There is creative reading as well as creative writing.
-Ralph Waldo Emerson
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I suppose every old scholar has had the experience of reading something in a book which was significant to him, but which he could never find again. Sure he is that he read it there, but no one else ever read it, nor can he find it again, though he buy the book and ransack every page.
-Ralph Waldo Emerson
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When I get a little money, I buy books; and if any is left I buy food and clothes.
-Desiderius Erasmus
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When you reread a classic, you do not see more in the book than you did before; you see more in you than there was before.
-Clifton Fadiman
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The tools I need for my work are paper, tobacco, food, and a little whiskey.
-William Faulkner
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Read, read, read. Read everything-- trash, classics, good and bad, and see how they do it. Just like a carpenter who works as an apprentice and studies the master. Read! You'll absorb it. Then write. If it is good, you'll find out. If it's not, throw it out the window.
-William Faulkner
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I learned little save that most of the deeds, good and bad both, incurring opprobrium or plaudits or reward either, within the scope of man's abilities, had already been performed and were to be learned about only from books.
-William Faulkner, character Thomas Sutpen in
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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.
-Francois FeNelon
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There is a wonder in reading Braille that the sighted will never know: to touch words and have them touch you back.
-Jim Fiebig
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We are as liable to be corrupted by books, as by companions.
-Henry Fielding
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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.
-Henry Fielding
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Many a play is like a painted backdrop, something to be looked at from the front. An Ibsen play is like a black forest, something you can enter, something you can walk about in. There you can lose yourself: you can lose yourself. And once inside, you find such wonderful glades, such beautiful, sunlit places.
-Minnie Maddern Fiske, Mrs. Fiske: Her Views on Actors, Acting and the Problems of Production, ch. 2, by Alexander Woollcott (1917). On Henrik Ibsen (1828-1906), Norwegian author
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Read in order to live.
-Gustave Flaubert
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One always tends to overpraise a long book, because one has got through it.
-E. M. Forster
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I suggest that the only books that influence us are those for which we are ready, and which have gone a little further down our particular path than we have gone ourselves.
-E. M. Forster
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They go too far because they do not reflect what personality is. Just as words have two functions - information and creation - so each human mind has two personalities, one on the surface, one deeper down. The upper personality has a name. . . . It is conscious and alert, it does things like dining out, answering letters, etc., and it differs vividly and amusingly from other personalities. The lower personality is a very queer affair. In many ways it is a perfect fool, but without it there is no literature, because unless a man dips a bucket down into it occasionally he cannot produce first-class work. There is something general about it. Although it is inside S. T. Coleridge, it cannot be labelled with his name. It has something in common with all other deeper personalities, and the mystic will assert that the common quality is God, and that here, in the obscure recesses of our being, we near the gates of the Divine. It is in any case the force that makes for anonymity. As it came from the depths, so it soars to the heights, out of local questionings; as it is general to all men, so the works it inspires have something general about them, namely beauty. The poet wrote the poem no doubt, but he forgot himself while he wrote it, and we forget him while we read. What is so wonderful about great literature is that it transforms the man who reads it towards the condition of the man who wrote, and brings to birth in us also the creative impulse. Lost in the beauty where he was lost, we find more than we ever threw away, we reach what seems to be our spiritual home, and remember that it was not the speaker who was in the beginning but the Word.
-E. M. Forster, Anonymity: an Enquiry, 1925
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The best way to become a successful writer is to read good writing, remember it, and then forget where you remember it from.
-Gene Fowler
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The books that everybody admires are those that nobody reads.
-Anatole France
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Reading makes a full man, meditation a profound man, discourse a clear man.
-Benjamin Franklin
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Read much, but not many books.
-Benjamin Franklin
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No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader.
-Robert Frost
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I don't think any good book is based on factual experience. Bad books are about things the writer already knew before he wrote them.
-Carlos Fuentes
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A house is not a home unless it contains food and fire for the mind as well as the body.
-Margaret Fuller
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It does not follow because many books are written by persons born in America that there exists an American literature. Books which imitate or represent the thoughts and life of Europe do not constitute an American literature. Before such can exist, an original idea must animate this nation and fresh currents of life must call into life fresh thoughts along the shore.
-Margaret Fuller
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A book that is shut is but a block.
-Thomas Fuller
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Today a reader, tomorrow a leader.
-W. Fusselman
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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.
-Harold S. Geneen
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My early and invincible love of reading I would not exchange for all the riches of India.
-Edward Gibbon
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Books are those faithful mirrors that reflect to our mind the minds of sages and heroes.
-Edward Gibbon
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I would like the events never to be told directly by the author, but rather to be introduced (and several times, from various angles) by those among the characters on whom they will have had any effect. I would like those events, in the account they will make of them, to appear slightly distorted; a kind of interest stems, for the reader, from the simple fact that he should need to restore. The story requires his collaboration in order to properly take shape.
http://www.adpf.asso.fr/adpf-publi/folio/textes/gide_ang.rtf
-Andr, from a note of the Journal des Faux-Monnayeurs, November 21, 1920
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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
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As writers become more numerous, it is natural for readers to become more indolent; whence must necessarily arise a desire of attaining knowledge with the greatest possible ease.
-Oliver Goldsmith
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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.
-Oliver Goldsmith, The Citizen of the World (letter LXXXIII)
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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.
-Sir James Goldsmith
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I read part of it all the way through.
-Samuel Goldwyn
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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.
-Jacquelyn Gross
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I have read your book and much like it.
-Moses Hadas
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Thank you for sending me a copy of your book -- I'll waste no time reading it.
-Moses Hadas
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From every book invisible threads reach out to other books; and as the mind comes to use and control those threads the whole panorama of the world's life, past and present, becomes constantly more varied and interesting, while at the same time the mind's own powers of reflection and judgment are exercised and strengthened.
-Helen E. Haines
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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.
-Elizabeth Hardwick
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Books give not wisdom where none was before. But where some is, there reading makes it more.
-John Harington
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In a real sense, people who have read good literature have lived more than people who cannot or will not read. It is not true that we have only one life to live; if we can read, we can live as many more lives and as many kinds of lives as we wish.
-S. I. Hayakawa
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If I have not read a book before, it is, for all intents and purposes, new to me whether it was printed yesterday or three hundred years ago.
-William Hazlitt
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The good parts of a book may be only something a writer is lucky enough to overhear or it may be the wreck of his whole damn life --and one is as good as the other.
-Ernest Hemingway
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All good books are alike in that they are truer than if they had really happened and after you are finished reading one you will feel that all that happened to you and the afterwards it all belongs to you; the good and the bad, the ecstasy, the remorse, and sorrow, the people and places and how the weather was.
-Ernest Hemingway
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Old books, you know well, are books of the world's youth, and new books are the fruits of its age.
-Oliver Wendell Holmes
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The most foolish kind of a book is a kind of leaky boat on the sea of wisdom; some of the wisdom will get in anyhow.
-Oliver Wendell Holmes
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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.
-Oliver Wendell Holmes
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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.
-Paxton Hood
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Be as careful of the books you read, as of the company you keep; for your habits and character will be as much influenced by the former as by the latter.
-Paxton Hood
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My books kept me from the ring, the dog-pit, the tavern, and the saloon.
-Thomas Hood
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A book might be written on the injustice of the just.
-Anthony Hope
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You must often make erasures if you mean to write what is worthy of being read a second time; and don't labor for the admiration of the crowd, but be content with a few choice readers.
-Horace
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Books in a large university library system: 2, 000,000. Books in an average large city library: 1 0,000. Average number of books in a chain bookstore: 30, 000. Books in an average neighborhood branch library: 20, 000.
-Lois Horowitz
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Good literature continually read for pleasure must, let us hope, do some good to the reader: must quicken his perception though dull, and sharpen his discrimination though blunt, and mellow the rawness of his personal opinions.
-A.E. Housman, The Name and Nature of Poetry
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The mortality of all inanimate things is terrible to me, but that of books most of all.
-William Dean Howells
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This will never be a civilized country until we expend more money for books than we do for chewing gum.
-Elbert Hubbard
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To learn to read is to light a fire; every syllable that is spelled out is a spark.
-Victor Hugo
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It is from books that wise people derive consolation in the troubles of life.
-Victor Hugo
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It is books that teach us to refine our pleasures when young, and to recall them with satisfaction when we are old.
-Leigh Hunt
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A bad book is as much of a labor to write as a good one; it comes as sincerely from the author's soul.
-Aldous Huxley
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Human contacts have been so highly valued in the past only because reading was not a common accomplishment.... The world, you must remember, is only just becoming literate. As reading becomes more and more habitual and widespread, an ever-increasing number of people will discover that books will give them all the pleasures of social life and none of its intolerable tedium.
-Aldous Huxley, Henry Wimbush, in Crome Yellow, ch. 28, 1922
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Books are the money of Literature, but only the counters of Science.
-Thomas Henry Huxley
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The newest books are those that never grow old.
-Holbrook Jackson
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Read as you taste fruit or savor wine, or enjoy friendship, love or life.
-Holbrook Jackson
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The only obligation to which in advance we may hold a novel, without incurring the accusation of being arbitrary, is that it be interesting.
-Henry James
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He had dropped upon a seat halfway down the nave and, again in the museum mood, was trying with head thrown back and eyes aloft, to reconstitute a past, to reduce it in fact to the convenient terms of Victor Hugo, whom, a few days before, giving the rein for once in a way to the joy of life, he had purchased in seventy bound volumes, a miracle of cheapness, parted with, he was assured by the shopman, at the price of the red-and-gold alone. He looked, doubtless, while he played his eternal nippers over Gothic glooms, sufficiently rapt in reverence; but what his thought had finally bumped against was the question of where, among packed accumulations, so multiform a wedge would be able to enter..
-Henry James, The Ambassadors, 1909
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I cannot live without books.
-Thomas Jefferson
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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.
-Thomas Jefferson
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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.
-Johnson
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Books to judicious compilers, are useful; to particular arts and professions, they are absolutely necessary; to men of real science, they are tools: but more are tools to them.
-Johnson
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What is written without effort is in general read without pleasure.
-Samuel Johnson
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Books that you carry to the fire, and hold readily in your hand, are most useful after all.
-Samuel Johnson
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A man ought to read just as his inclination leads him; for what he reads as a task will do him little good.
-Samuel Johnson
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He that reads and grows no wiser seldom suspects his own deficiency, but complains of hard words and obscure sentences, and asks why books are written which cannot be understood.
-Samuel Johnson
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The most heterogeneous ideas are yoked by violence together; nature and art are ransacked for illustrations, comparisons, and allusions; their learning instructs, and their subtlety surprises; but the reader commonly thinks his improvement dearly bought and, though he sometimes admires, is seldom pleased.
-Samuel Johnson
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Books like friends, should be few and well-chosen.
-Joineriana
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You will be the same person in five as you are today except for the people you meet and the books you read.
-Charles ''Tremendous'' Jones
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A book burrows into your life in a very profound way because the experience of reading is not passive.
-Erica Jong
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There was a time when the world acted on books; now books act on the world.
-Joseph Joubert
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The worst thing about new books is that they keep us from reading the old ones.
-Joseph Joubert
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One man is as good as another until he has written a book.
-Benjamin Jowett
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Much have I travell'd in the realms of gold,
And many goodly states and kingdoms seen;
Round many western islands have I been
Which bards in fealty to Apollo hold.
Oft of one wide expanse had I been told
That deep-brow'd Homer ruled as his demesne;
Yet did I never breathe its pure serene
Till I heard Chapman speak out loud and bold:
Then felt I like some watcher of the skies
When a new planet swims into his ken;
Or like stout Cortez when with eagle eyes
He star'd at the Pacific--and all his men
Look'd at each other with a wild surmise--
Silent, upon a peak in Darien.
-John Keats, On First Looking Into Chapman's Homer, 1816
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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.
-Sir Arthur Keith
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Everywhere I have sought rest and not found it, except sitting in a corner by myself with a little book.
-Thomas Kempis
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To sit alone in the lamplight with a book spread out before you hold intimate converse with men of unseen generations -- such is pleasure beyond compare.
-Yoshida Kenko
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I am a part of everything that I have read.
-John Kieran
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If you want to be a writer, you must do two things above all others: read a lot and write a lot...reading is the creative center of a writer's life...you cannot hope to sweep someone else away by the force of your writing until it has been done to you.
-Stephen King
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We ought to reverence books; to look on them as useful and mighty things. If they are good and true, whether they are about religion, politics, farming, trade, law, or medicine, they are the message of Christ, the maker of all things -- the teacher of all truth.
-Charles Kingsley
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Except a living man there is nothing more wonderful than a book! a message to us from the dead -- from human souls we never saw, who lived, perhaps, thousands of miles away. And yet these, in those little sheets of paper, speak to us, arouse us, terrify us, teach us, comfort us, open their hearts to us as brothers.
-Charles Kingsley
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Except a living man there is nothing more wonderful than a book! A message to us from the dead, - from human souls whom we never saw, who lived perhaps thousands of miles away; and yet these, on those little sheets of paper, speak to us, teach us, comfort us, open their hearts to us as brothers.
-Charles Kingsley
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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.
-E.N. Kirk
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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.
-Peter Kump
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He has left off reading altogether, to the great improvement of his originality.
-Charles Lamb
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Borrowers of books --those mutilators of collections, spoilers of the symmetry of shelves, and creators of odd volumes.
-Charles Lamb
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I love to lose myself in other men's minds. When I am not walking, I am reading. I cannot sit and think; books think for me.
-Charles Lamb
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What is reading, but silent conversation.
-Walter Savage Landor
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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.
-D. H. (David Herbert) Lawrence
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One sheds one's sicknesses in books -- repeats and presents again one's emotions, to be master of them.
-D. H. (David Herbert) Lawrence
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I can't bear art that you can walk round and admire. A book should be either a bandit or a rebel or a man in the crowd.
-D. H. (David Herbert) Lawrence
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The classics are only primitive literature. They belong to the same class as primitive machinery and primitive music and primitive medicine.
-Stephen Leacock
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Until I feared I would lose it, I never loved to read. One does not love breathing.
-Harper Lee
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You've really got to start hitting the books because it's no joke out here.
-Spike Lee
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The unread story is not a story; it is little black marks on wood pulp. The reader, reading it, makes it live: a live thing, a story.
-Ursula K. LeGuin
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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.
-Caroline Lejeune
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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.
-Ghita Levine
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There are very many people who read simply to prevent themselves from thinking.
-G. C. (Georg Christoph) Lichtenberg
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Do we write books so that they shall merely be read? Don't we also write them for employment in the household? For one that is read from start to finish, thousands are leafed through, other thousands lie motionless, others are jammed against mouseholes, thrown at rats, others are stood on, sat on, drummed on, have gingerbread baked on them or are used to light pipes.
-G. C. (Georg Christoph) Lichtenberg
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A vacuum of ideas affects people differently than a vacuum of air, otherwise readers of books would be constantly collapsing.
-G. C. (Georg Christoph) Lichtenberg
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The things I want to know are in books; my best friend is the man who'll get me a book I ain't read.
-Abraham Lincoln
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The most valuable thing in my wallet is my library card.
-Michael Lipsey
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Reading furnishes the mind only with material for knowledge; it is thinking that makes what we read ours.
-John Locke
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I feel a kind of reverence for the first books of young authors. There is so much aspiration in them, so much audacious hope and trembling fear, so much of the heart's history, that all errors and shortcomings are for a while lost sight of in the amiable self assertion of youth.
-Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
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Many readers judge of the power of a book by the shock it gives their feelings --as some savage tribes determine the power of muskets by their recoil; that being considered best which fairly prostrates the purchaser.
-Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
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All books are either dreams or swords.
-Amy Lowell
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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.
-Amy Lowell
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Books are the bees which carry the quickening pollen from one to another mind.
-James Russell Lowell
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What a sense of security in an old book which time has criticized for us.
-James Russell Lowell
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The multitude of books is a great evil. There is no limit to this fever for writing.
-Martin Luther
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In science, read by preference the newest works. In literature, read the oldest. The classics are always modern.
-Lord Edward Lytton
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I hope and hoping feeds my pain
I weep and weeping feeds my failing heart
I laugh but the laughter does not pass within
I burn but the burning makes no mark outside
-Niccolo Machiavelli, Machiavelli's poem (undated)
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A novel must be exceptionally good to live as long as the average cat.
-Hugh Maclennan
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Everything in the world exists to end up in a book.
-Stephane Mallarme
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A house without books is like a room without windows. No man has a right to bring up his children without surrounding them with books, if he has the means to buy them. It is wrong to his family. Children learn to read by being in the presence of books. The love of knowledge comes with reading and grows upon it. And the love of knowledge, in a young mind, is almost a warrant against the inferior excitement of passions and vices.
-Horace Mann
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The pleasure of reading is doubled when one lives with another who shares the same books.
-Katherine Mansfield
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Once we have learned to read, meaning of words can somehow register without consciousness.
-Anthony Marcel
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Readers are plentiful: thinkers are rare.
-Harriet Martineau
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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
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I would sooner read a timetable or a catalog than nothing at all.
-W. Somerset Maugham
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To acquire the habit of reading is to construct for yourself a refuge from almost all the miseries of life.
-W. Somerset Maugham
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When I read a book I seem to read it with my eyes only, but now and then I come across a passage, perhaps only a phrase, which has a meaning for me, and it becomes part of me.
-W. Somerset Maugham
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What is important is not to be able to read rapidly, but to be able to decide what not to read.
-James T. Mccay
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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.
-Mccosh
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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.
-Richard McKenna
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A successful book cannot afford to be more than ten percent new.
-Marshall McLuhan
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The chief knowledge that a man gets from reading books is the knowledge that very few of them are worth reading.
-H. L. Mencken
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There are two kinds of books. Those that no one reads and those that no one ought to read.
-H. L. Mencken
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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.
-H. L. Mencken
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A person who publishes a book appears willfully in public with his pants down.
-Edna St. Vincent Millay
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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.
-Henry Miller
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A book is a part of life, a manifestation of life, just as much as a tree or a horse or a star. It obeys its own rhythms, its own laws, whether it be a novel, a play, or a diary. The deep, hidden rhythm of life is always there -- that of the pulse, the heart beat.
-Henry Miller
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All my good reading, you might say, was done in the toilet. There are passages in Ulysses which can be read only in the toilet -- if one wants to extract the full flavor of their content.
-Henry Miller
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A book is not only a friend, it makes friends for you. When you have possessed a book with mind and spirit, you are enriched. But when you pass it on you are enriched threefold.
-Henry Miller, The Books In My Life, 1969
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I believe that today more than ever a book should be sought after even if it has only one great page in it: we must search for fragments, splinters, toenails, anything that has ore in it, anything that is capable of resuscitating the body and soul.
-Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer
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Deep versed in books and shallow in himself.
-John Milton
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A good book is the precious life-blood of the master spirit, embalmed and treasured up on purpose for a life beyond.
-John Milton
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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 progeny they are; nay, they do preserve as in a vial the purest efficacy and extraction of that living intellect that bred them. I know they are as lively, and as vigorously productive, as those fabulous dragon's teeth; and being sown up and down, may chance to spring up armed men.
-John Milton
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Who kills a man kills a reasonable creature, God's image, but thee who destroys a good book, kills reason itself.
-John Milton
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Books are not absolutely dead things, but do contain a certain potency of life in them, to be as active as the soul whose progeny they are; they preserve, as in a vial, the purest efficacy and extraction of the living intellect that bred them.
-John Milton
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Books and marriage go ill together.
-Moli
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No entertainment is so cheap as reading, nor is any pleasure so lasting.
-Mary Wortley Montagu
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Every abridgement of a good book is a fool abridged.
-Michel de Montaigne
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The constant habit of perusing devout books is so indispensable, that it has been termed the oil of the lamp of prayer. Too much reading, however, and too little meditation, may produce the effect of a lamp inverted; which is extinguished by the very excess of that ailment, whose property is to feed it.
-Hannah More
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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.
-John Morley
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Books worth reading once are worth reading twice; and what is most important of all, the masterpieces of literature are worth reading a thousand times.
-John Morley
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A dose of poison can do its work but once. A bad book can go on poisoning minds for generations.
-William H. Murray
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Readers are not sheep, and not every pen tempts them.
-Vladimir Nabokov, LECTURES ON LITERATURE, 1980
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The worst readers are those who behave like plundering troops: they take away a few things they can use, dirty and confound the remainder, and revile the whole.
-Friedrich Nietzsche
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Early in the morning, at break of day, in all the freshness and dawn of one's strength, to read a book --I call that vicious!
-Friedrich Nietzsche
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Read good, big important things.
-Peggy Noonan
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The books one reads in childhood, and perhaps most of all the bad and good bad books, create in one's mind a sort of false map of the world, a series of fabulous countries into which one can retreat at odd moments throughout the rest of life...
-George Orwell, Riding Down from Bangor
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This book is not to be tossed lightly aside, but to be hurled with great force.
-Dorothy Parker
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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.
-Theodore Parker
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The last thing one discovers in composing a work is what to put first.
-Blaise Pascal
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Much reading is an oppression of the mind, and extinguishes the natural candle, which is the reason of so many senseless scholars in the world.
-William Penn
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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.
-Thomas J. Peters
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Wear the old coat and buy the new book.
-Austin Phelps
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I divide all readers into two classes: those who read to remember and those who read to forget.
-William Lyon Phelps
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What gunpowder did for war the printing press has done for the mind.
-Wendell Phillips
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The bookful blockhead ignorantly read,
With loads of learned lumber in his head,
With his own tongue still edifies his ears,
And always list'ning to himself appears.
All books he reads, and all he reads assails.
-Alexander Pope
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No one can read with profit that which he cannot learn to read with pleasure.
-Noah Porter
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No man understands a deep book until he has seen and lived at least part of its contents.
-Ezra Pound
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With one day's reading a man may have the key in his hands.
-Ezra Pound
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Properly, we should read for power. Man reading should be man intensely alive. The book should be a ball of light in one's hand.
-Ezra Pound
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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.
-Jean Rhys
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Reading makes immigrants of us all. It takes us away from home, but more important, it finds homes for us everywhere.
-Hazel Rochman
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Upon books the collective education of the race depends; they are the sole instruments of registering, perpetuating and transmitting thought.
-Henry C. Rogers
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A man only learns in two ways, one by reading, and the other by association with smarter people.
-Will Rogers
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The book you don't read won't help.
-Jim Rohn
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Miss a meal if you have to, but don't miss a book.
-Jim Rohn
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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.
-Jim Rohn
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Don't just read the easy stuff. You may be entertained by it, but you will never grow from it.
-Jim Rohn
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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.
-Eleanor Roosevelt
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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.
-A. S. W. Rosenbach
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Prerequisite for rereadability in books: that they be forgettable.
-Jean Rostand
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The books one has written in the past have two surprises in store: one couldn't write them again, and wouldn't want to.
-Jean Rostand
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In the dark colony of night, when I consider man's magnificent capacity for malice, madness, folly, envy, rage, and destructiveness, and I wonder whether we shall not end up as breakfast for newts and polyps, I seem to hear the muffled cries of all the words in all the books with covers closed.
-Leo Rosten
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A book is a version of the world. If you do not like it, ignore it; or offer your own version in return.
-Salman Rushdie
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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.
-Salman Rushdie
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A book worth reading is worth buying.
-John Ruskin
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You should read books like you take medicine, by advice, and not by advertisement.
-John Ruskin
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Be sure that you go to the author to get at his meaning, not to find yours.
-John Ruskin
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Books are divided into two classes, the books of the hour and the books of all time.
-John Ruskin
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How long most people would look at the best book before they would give the price of a large turbot for it?
-John Ruskin
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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.
-John Ruskin
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There are two motives for reading a book: one, that you enjoy it; the other, that you can boast about it.
-Bertrand Russell
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A book is made from a tree. It is an assemblage of flat, flexible parts (still called
-Carl Sagan
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A library is thought in cold storage.
-Herbert Samuel
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I am what libraries and librarians have made me, with little assistance from a professor of Greek and poets.
-B. K. Sandwell
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Without books the development of civilization would have been impossible. They are the engines of change, windows on the world, Lighthouses as the poet said erected in the sea of time. They are companions, teachers, magicians, bankers of the treasures of the mind, Books are humanity in print.
-Arthur Schopenhauer
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To buy books would be a good thing if we also could buy the time to read them.
-Arthur Schopenhauer
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Reading is equivalent to thinking with someone else's head instead of with one's own.
-Arthur Schopenhauer
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Buying books would be a good thing if one could also buy the time to read them in: but as a rule the purchase of books is mistaken for the appropriation of their contents.
-Arthur Schopenhauer
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Books are like a mirror. If an ass looks in, you can't expect an angel to look out.
-Arthur Schopenhauer
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I've never know any trouble than an hour's reading didn't assuage.
-Charles de Secondat
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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.
-Giorgos Seferis
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O, let my books be then the eloquence and dumb presages of my speaking breast.
-William Shakespeare
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How can you dare teach a man to read until you've taught him everything else first?
-George Bernard Shaw
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Here, my dear Lucy, hide these books. Quick, quick! Fling Peregrine Pickle under the toilette --throw Roderick Random into the closet --put The Innocent Adultery into The Whole Duty of Man; thrust Lord Aimworth under the sofa! cram Ovid behind the bolster; there --put The Man of Feeling into your pocket. Now for them.
-Richard Brinsley Sheridan
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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.
-Andre Sinyavsky
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Then I though of reading -- the nice and subtle happiness of reading ... this joy not dulled by age, this polite and unpunishable vice, this selfish, serene, lifelong intoxication.
-Logan Pearsall Smith
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People say that life is the thing, but I prefer reading.
-Logan Pearsall Smith, Myself
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No furniture is so charming as books.
-Sydney Smith
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Live always in the best company when you read.
-Sydney Smith
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A multitude of books distracts the mind.
-Socrates
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Only a generation of readers will span a generation of writers.
-Steven Spielberg
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Reading is to the mind what exercise is to the body. It is wholesome and bracing for the mind to have its faculties kept on the stretch.
-Sir Richard Steele
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A book is like a man - clever and dull, brave and cowardly, beautiful and ugly. For every flowering thought there will be a page like a wet and mangy mongrel, and for every looping flight a tap on the wing and a reminder that wax cannot hold the feathers firm too near the sun.
-John Steinbeck
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The age of the book is almost gone.
-George Steiner
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A novel is a mirror carried along a main road.
-Henri B. Stendhal
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One may as well be asleep as to read for anything but to improve his mind and morals, and regulate his conduct.
-Laurence Sterne
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Books are good enough in their own way, but they are a mighty bloodless substitute for life.
-Robert Louis Stevenson
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Why pay a dollar for a bookmark? Why not use the dollar for a bookmark?
-Fred Stoller
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A great book should leave you with many experiences and slightly exhausted at the end. You should live several lives while reading it.
-William Styron
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A great book of literature should leave you with many experiences, and slightly exhausted at the end. You live several lives while reading it.
-William Styron
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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.
-J. Swartz
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Who are you, reader, reading my poems an hundred years hence?
I cannot send you one single flower from this wealth of the spring, one single streak of gold from yonder clouds.
Open your doors and look abroad.
From your blossoming garden gather fragrant memories of the vanished flowers of an hundred years before.
In the joy of your heart may you feel the living joy that sang one spring morning, sending its glad voice across a hundred years.
-Rabindranath Tagore, The Gardener, 1915
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Books, like proverbs, receive their chief value from the stamp and esteem of the ages through which they have passed
-Sir William Temple
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Who ever converses among old books will be hard to please among the new.
-Sir William Temple
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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.
-Helen Terry
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If a secret history of books could be written, and the author's private thoughts and meanings noted down alongside of his story, how many insipid volumes would become interesting, and dull tales excite the reader!
-William Makepeace Thackeray
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To read well, that is, to read true books in a true spirit, is a noble exercise, and one that will task the reader more than any other exercise which the customs of the day esteem. It requires a training such as the athletes underwent, the steady intention almost of the whole life to this object.
-Henry David Thoreau
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Read the best books first, or you may not have a chance to read them at all.
-Henry David Thoreau
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Books must be read as deliberately and reservedly as they were written.
-Henry David Thoreau
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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.
-Henry David Thoreau
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How many a man has dated a new era in his life from the reading of a book! The book exists for us, perchance, that will explain our miracles and reveal new ones. The at present unutterable things we may find somewhere uttered.
-Henry David Thoreau
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A truly good book teaches me better than to read it. I must lay it down and commence living on its hint. . . . What I began by reading I must finish by acting.
-Henry David Thoreau, Journal, February 19, 1841
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There is no such thing as a functional illiterate.
-Kelvin Throop III
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I always begin at the left with the opening word of the sentence and read toward the right and I recommend this method.
-James Thurber
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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.
-Leo Tolstoy
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No matter how busy you may think you are, you must find time for reading, or surrender yourself to self-chosen ignorance.
-Atwood H. Townsend
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An empty book is like an infant's soul, in which anything may be written. It is capable of all things, but containeth nothing. I have a mind to fill this with profitable wonders.
-Thomas Traherne
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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.
-G. M. Trevelyan
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Book love... is your pass to the greatest, the purest, and the most perfect pleasure that God has prepared for His creatures.
-Anthony Trollope
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One half who graduate from college never read another book.
-Herbert True
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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?
-Marina Ivanova Tsvetaeva
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A good book is the best of friends, the same today and for ever.
-Martin Tupper
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A classic is something that everybody wants to have read and nobody wants to read.
-Mark Twain
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People are much more willing to lend you books than bookcases.
-Mark Twain
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My books are water; those of the great geniuses are wine -- everybody drinks water.
-Mark Twain
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A big leather-bound volume makes an ideal razor strap. A thin book is useful to stick under a table with a broken caster to steady it. A large, flat atlas can be used to cover a window with a broken pane. And a thick, old-fashioned heavy book with a clasp is the finest thing in the world to throw at a noisy cat.
-Mark Twain
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The man who does not read good books has no advantage over the man who cannot read them.
-Mark Twain
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Why do we want to test people for drugs and alcohol? Why don't we test them from stupidity, illiteracy and avarice? The place would be better.
-Source Unknown
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Those who do not read are no better off than those who cannot read.
-Source Unknown
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Reading the Scriptures is an uplifting experience.
-Source Unknown
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In any situation, ask yourself: What strengths do I possess that can contribute towards accomplishing something in this situation? Then follow through.
-Source Unknown
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I wish I could write a beautiful book to break those hearts that are soon to cease to exist: a book of faith and small neat worlds and of people who live by the philosophies of popular songs.
-Source Unknown
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It skims in through the eye, and by means of the utterly delicate retina hurls shadows like insect legs inward for translation. Then an immense space opens up in silence and an endlessly fecund sub-universe the writer descends, and asks the reader to descend after him, not merely to gain instructions but also to experience delight, the delight of mind freed from matter and exultant in the strength it has stolen from matter.
-John Updike
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Ideally a book would have no order to it, and the reader would have to discover his own.
-Raoul Vaneigem
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All the known world, excepting only savage nations, is governed by books.
-Voltaire (François-Marie Arouet)
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It is far better to be silent than merely to increase the quantity of bad books.
-Voltaire (François-Marie Arouet)
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The books we think we ought to read are poky, dull, and dry; The books that we would like to read we are ashamed to buy; The books that people talk about we never can recall; And the books that people give us, oh, they're the worst of all.
-Carolyn Wells
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Beware you be not swallowed up in books! An ounce of love is worth a pound of knowledge.
-John Wesley
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Fiction reveals truth that reality obscures.
-Jessamyn West
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Books are lighthouses erected in the great sea of time.
-Edwin P. Whipple
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Camerado! This is no book; who touches this touches a man.
-Walt Whitman
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The words of my book nothing, the drift of it everything.
-Walt Whitman
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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.
-John Greenleaf Whittier
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The books that the world calls immoral are the books that show the world its own shame.
-Oscar Wilde
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There is no such thing as a moral book or an immoral book. Books are well written or badly written. That is all.
-Oscar Wilde
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Books had instant replay long before televised sports.
-Bert Williams
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The reason a writer writes a book is to forget a book and the reason a reader reads one is to remember it.
-Thomas Wolfe
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Somewhere, everywhere, now hidden, now apparent in what ever is written down, is the form of a human being. If we seek to know him, are we idly occupied?
-Virginia Woolf
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The only advice, indeed, that one person can give another about reading is to take no advice, to follow your own instincts, to use your own reason, to come to your own conclusions. If this is agreed between us, then I feel at liberty to put forward a few ideas and suggestions because you will not allow them to fetter that independence which is the most important quality that a reader can possess. After all, what laws can be laid down about books? The battle of Waterloo was certainly fought on a certain day; but is Hamlet a better play than Lear? Nobody can say. Each must decide that question for himself. To admit authorities, however heavily furred and gowned, into our libraries and let them tell us how to read, what to read, what value to place upon what we read, is to destroy the spirit of freedom which is the breath of those sanctuaries. Everywhere else we may be bound by laws and conventions-there we have none.
-Virginia Woolf, How Should One Read a Book?, 1932
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Old books that have ceased to be of service should no more be abandoned than should old friends who have ceased to give pleasure.
-Sir Peregrine Worsthorne
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Choose an author as you choose a friend.
-Sir Christopher Wren
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Thy books should, like thy friends, not many be, yet such wherein men may thy judgment see.
-William Wycherley
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Man ceased to be an ape, vanquished the ape, on the day the first book was written.
-Yevgeny Zamyatin
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To read too many books is harmful.
-Mao Zedong
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Books about Reading
