He who destroys a good book kills reason itself.
A good book is the precious lifeblood of a master spirit.
Promiscuous reading is necessary to the constituting of human nature. The attempt to keep out evil doctrine by licensing is like the exploit of that gallant man who thought to keep out the crows by shutting the park gate.
Every time I am reading actors I can pretty well tell which ones have studied with Meisner. It is because they are honest and simple and don’t lay on complications that aren’t necessary.
The only end of writing is to enable readers better to enjoy life or better to endure it.
You can never be wise unless you love reading.
A writer only begins a book. A reader finishes it.
I never desire to converse with a man who has written more than he has read.
A man ought to read just as inclination leads him, for what he reads as a task will do him little good.
Every reader should remember the diffidence of Socrates, and repair by his candour the injuries of time: he should impute the seeming defects of his author to some chasm of intelligence, and suppose that the sense which is now weak was once forcible.
The purpose of a writer is to be read, and the criticism which would destroy the power of pleasing must be blown aside.
Read the book you do honestly feel a wish and curiosity to read.
I have always suspected that the reading is right, which requires many words to prove it wrong; and the emendation wrong, that cannot without so much labour appear to he right.
A lexicographer, a writer of dictionaries, a harmless drudge.
If a man begins to read in the middle of a book, and feels an inclination to go on, let him not quit it to go to the beginning. He may perhaps not feel again the inclination.
No man reads a book of science from pure inclination. The books that we do read with pleasure are light compositions, which contain a quick succession of events.
People seldom read a book which is given to them; and few are given. The way to spread a work is to sell it at a low price. No man will send to buy a thing that costs even sixpence without an intention to read it.
It is strange that there should be so little reading in the world, and so much writing. People in general do not willingly read, if they can have any thing else to amuse them.
He that reads and grows no wiser seldom suspects his own deficiency, but complains of hard words and obscure sentences, and asks why books are written which cannot be understood.
One of the amusements of idleness is reading without fatigue of close attention; and the world, therefore, swarms with writers whose wish is not to be studied, but to be read.