“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.”
“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.”
“Book love, my friends, is your pass to the greatest, the purest, and the most perfect pleasure that God has prepared for His creatures.”
“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.”
“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.”
“The classics are only primitive literature. They belong to the same class as primitive machinery and primitive music and primitive medicine.”
“The only obligation to which in advance we may hold a novel, without incurring the accusation of being arbitrary, is that it be interesting.”
“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.”
“Upon books the collective education of the race depends; they are the sole instruments of registering, perpetuating and transmitting thought.”
“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.”
“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.”
“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.''”
“What we become depends on what we read after all the professors have finished with us. The greatest university of all is the collection of books.”
“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.”
“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.”
“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.”
“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.”
“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.”
“A bibliophile of little means is likely to suffer often. Books don't slip from his hands but fly past him through the air, high as birds, high as prices.”
“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?”
“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.”
“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.”
“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.”
“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.”
“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.”
“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.”
“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.”
“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.”
“The only books that influence us are those for which we are ready, and which have gone a little farther down our particular path than we have yet got ourselves.”
“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.”