Quotes About Reading

If I read as many books as most men do, I would be as dull-witted as they are.

If I had read as much as other men had, I would have known as little.

If I had read as many books as other people, I would know as little.

Easy reading is damned hard writing.

The easiest reading is damned hard writing.

I do not take a single newspaper, nor read one a month, and I feel myself infinitely the happier for it.

Where the press is free and every man able to read, all is safe.

Without books, I would certainly die.

I cannot live without books: but fewer will suffice where amusement, and not use, is the only future object.

I cannot live without books. Thomas Jefferson

A little attention however to the nature of the human mind evinces that the entertainments of fiction are useful as well as pleasant. That they are pleasant when well written, every person feels who reads. But wherein is its utility, asks the reverend sage, big with the notion that nothing can be useful but the learned lumber of Greek and Roman reading with which his head is stored? I answer, every thing is useful which contributes to fix us in the principles and practice of virtue.

I cannot live without my books -

I have given up newspapers in exchange for Tacitus and Thucydides, for Newton and Euclid; and I find myself much the happier.

I can't live without books

I cannot live qithout books~ Thomas Jefferson

I can not live without books

I cannot live without books. --Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826)

He had some taste for romance reading before he went to the university, where, we must confess, in justice to his college, he was cured of the love of reading in all its shapes; and the cure would have been radical, if disappointment in love, and total solitude, had not conspired to bring on a relapse.

The books and magazines streamed in. He could buy them all, they piled up around him and even while he read, the number of those still to be read disturbed him. … they stood in rows, weighing down his life like a possession which he did not succeed in subordinating to his personality.

Wrapped in his coat, a book in his lap, the traveler took his ease, the hours slipping by unnoticed.

Mas Hans Castorp replicou que preferia possuir os livros, e que a leitura era bem diferente quando o livro lhe pertencia; além disso gostava de sublinhar e assinalar certos trechos a lápis.

But then he came across a long chapter that he read from the first word to the last, with his lips tightly closed, his eyebrows pursed, concentrating—his face registering a total, almost deathlike look of earnest concentration—oblivious to every trace of life stirring around him. This chapter was entitled: "Concerning Death and Its Relation to the Indestructibility of Our Essential Nature." He

Since I know only a few Chinese characters, I obviously am not a translator. These "readings" are then not attempts at faithful reproduction but ventures in personal and spiritual interpretation.

Therefore beware of the contemplative who says that theology is all straw before he has ever bothered to read any.