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 – Reading
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 – Story, Book, Reading
Let us read and let us dance – two amusements that will never do any harm to the world.
Voltaire – Reading, Dancing
Read the best books first, or you may not have a chance to read them at all.
Henry David Thoreau – Book, Reading
In order to dream so far, is it enough to read? Isn’t it necessary to write? Write as in our schoolboy past, in those days when, as Bonnoure says, the letters wrote themselves one by one, either in their gibbosity or else in their pretentious elegance? In those days, spelling was a drama, our drama of culture at work in the interior of a word.
Gaston Bachelard – Reading & Dreaming
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 – Reading, Flow of language
What a glorious garden of wonders the lights of Broadway would be to anyone lucky enough to be unable to read.
G.K. Chesterton – Reading
There is a great deal of difference between an eager man who wants to read a book and the tired man who wants a book to read.
G.K. Chesterton – Reading difference
By the consultation of books, whether of dead or living authors, many temptations of petulance and opposition, which occur in oral conferences, are avoided. An authour cannot obtrude his advice unasked, nor can be often suspected of any malignant intention to insult his readers with his knowledge or his wit. Yet so prevalent is the habit of comparing ourselves with others, while they remain within the reach of our passions, that books are seldom read with complete impartiality, but by those from whom the writer is placed at such a distance that his life or death is indifferent.
Samuel Johnson – Moral, Temptation, Reading
The purpose of a writer is to be read, and the criticism which would destroy the power of pleasing must be blown aside
Samuel Johnson – Writer, Reading, Critics
What we read with inclination makes a much stronger impression. If we read without inclination, half the mind is employed in fixing the attention; so there is but one half to be employed on what we read.
Samuel Johnson – Read with inclination
Some read for style, and some for argument: one has little care about the sentiment, he observes only how it is expressed; another regards not the conclusion, but is diligent to mark how it is inferred; they read for other purposes than the attainment of practical knowledge; and are no more likely to grow wise by an examination of a treatise of moral prudence, than an architect to inflame his devotion by considering attentively the proportions of a temple.
Samuel Johnson – Reading for style
Among those whose reputation is exhausted in a short time by its own luxuriance are the writers who take advantage of present incidents or characters which strongly interest the passions, and engage universal attention. It is not difficult to obtain readers, when we discuss a question which every one is desirous to understand, which is debated in every assembly, and has divided the nation into parties; or when we display the faults or virtues of him whose public conduct has made almost every man his enemy or his friend.
Samuel Johnson – Luxury, Reading, Popularity
We see that volumes may be perused, and perused with attention, to little effect; and that maxims of prudence, or principles of virtue, may be treasured in the memory without influencing the conduct. Of the numbers that pass their lives among books, very few read to be made wiser or better, apply any general reproof of vice to themselves, or try their own manners by axioms of justice. They purpose either to consume those hours for which they can find no other amusement, to gain or preserve that respect which learning has always obtained; or to gratify their curiosity with knowledge which, like treasure buried and forgotten, is of no use to others or themselves.
Samuel Johnson – Reading and behaviour
Read your own compositions, and when you meet a passage which you think is particularly fine, strike it out.
