Reading makes a full man, meditation a profound man, discourse a clear man.
He that composes himself is wiser than he that composes a book.
For the best return on your money, pour your purse into your head.
Often I sit up in my room reading the greatest part of the night, when the book was borrowed in the evening and to be returned early in the morning, lest it should be missed or wanted.
Women are books, and men the readers be...
All the little money that ever came into my hands was ever laid out in books.
Read much, but not too many books.
Scarcely was I arrived at fifteen years of age, when, after having doubted in turn of different tenets, according as I found them combated in the different books that I read, I began to doubt of Revelation itself.
I would advise you to read with a pen in your hand and enter in a little book short hints of what you feel that is common or that may be useful; for this will be the best method of imprinting such portcullis in your memory.
Beware the man of the single book.
Literature is inexhaustible, with every book a homage to infinity.
It is impossible to read in America, except on a train, because of the telephone. Everyone has a telephone, and it rings all day and most of the night.
All great books contain boring portions, and all great lives have contained uninteresting stretches.
If a law were passed giving six months to every writer of a first book, only the good ones would do it.
If you have a question about anything, the answer can be found in a book somewhere in the library.
You don’t go to other books and take little pieces because although say a romantic scene may have been many times before all the details of who it is, where it is, are so intertwined in that text that it’s easier to write it from scratch.
I’ve always been interested in science – one of my favourite books is James Watson’s ‘Molecular Biology of the Gene.’
For a highly motivated learner, it’s not like knowledge is secret and somehow the Internet made it not secret. It just made knowledge easy to find. If you’re a motivated enough learner, books are pretty good.
Harnessing steam power required many innovations, as William Rosen chronicles in the book ‘The Most Powerful Idea in the World.’
There is no author whose books I look forward to more than Vaclav Smil.