“He has left off reading altogether, to the great improvement of his originality.”
“It is far better to be silent than merely to increase the quantity of bad books.”
“Reading is not a duty, and has consequently no business to be made disagreeable.”
“There is an art of reading, as well as an art of thinking, and an art of writing.”
“When I get a little money, I buy books; and if any is left I buy food and clothes.”
“You should read books like you take medicine, by advice, and not by advertisement.”
“A classic is something that everybody wants to have read and nobody wants to read.”
“Until I feared I would lose it, I never loved to read. One does not love breathing.”
“Books are like a mirror. If an ass looks in, you can't expect an angel to look out.”
“How can you dare teach a man to read until you've taught him everything else first?”
“Man ceased to be an ape, vanquished the ape, on the day the first book was written.”
“To learn to read is to light a fire; every syllable that is spelled out is a spark.”
“My books are water; those of the great geniuses are wine -- everybody drinks water.”
“The multitude of books is a great evil. There is no limit to this fever for writing.”
“The flood of print has turned reading into a process of gulping rather than savoring”
“Books should to one of these fours ends conduce, for wisdom, piety, delight, or use.”
“Books are divided into two classes, the books of the hour and the books of all time.”
“A book is a mirror: If an ass peers into it, you can't expect an apostle to look out.”
“Reading is equivalent to thinking with someone else's head instead of with one's own.”
“The mere brute pleasure of reading --the sort of pleasure a cow must have in grazing.”
“The man who does not read books has no advantage over the man that can not read them.”
“Most books today seemed to have been written overnight from books read the day before.”
“The books that the world calls immoral are the books that show the world its own shame.”
“The world may be full of fourth-rate writers but it's also full of fourth-rate readers.”
“The mortality of all inanimate things is terrible to me, but that of books most of all.”
“Ideally a book would have no order to it, and the reader would have to discover his own.”
“Beware you be not swallowed up in books! An ounce of love is worth a pound of knowledge.”
“Books are men of higher stature; the only men that speak aloud for future times to hear.”
“You don't have to burn books to destroy a culture. Just get people to stop reading them.”
“Perhaps there are none more lazy, or more truly ignorant, than your everlasting readers.”