Quotes About Reading Emerson

#1. You can learn more by going to the opera than you ever can by reading Emerson. Like that there are two sexes.

David Markson

#2. One must be an inventor to read well.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

#3. In the highest civilization, the book is still the highest delight. He who has once known its satisfactions is provided with a resource against calamity.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

#4. I may say it of our preposterous use of books,
He knew not what to do, and so he read.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

#5. Dad said I would always be "high minded and low waged" from reading too much Ralph Waldo Emerson. Maybe he was right.

Jim Harrison

#6. Our high respect for a well-read man is praise enough for literature. - Ralph Waldo Emerson

Ralph Waldo Emerson

#7. Life loiters at the book's first page,
Ah! could we turn the leaf.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

#8. Books take their place according to their specific gravity as surely as potatoes in a tub.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

#9. It is a greater joy to see the author's author, than himself.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

#10. We, as we read, must become Greeks, Romans, Turks, priest and king, martyr and executioner; must fasten these images to some reality in our secret experience, or we shall learn nothing rightly.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

#11. You'll want to read books - novels, because ladies are frivolous; poetry because ladies are sentimental; and sermons, because we are pious. If you must read essays, Mr. Emerson might be best. Your gentleman may have a nodding acquaintance with his works.

Donald McCaig

#12. He who should inspire and lead his race must be defended from travelling with the souls of other men, from living, breathing, reading, and writing in the daily, time-worn yoke of their opinions.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

#13. Many times the reading of a book has made the future of a man.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

#14. I was too much of a Bronx kid to read Emerson or Hawthorne.

Don DeLillo

#15. I cannot remember the books I've read any more than the meals I have eaten; even so, they have made me.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

#16. The genius of reading and of gardening are antagonistic, like resinous and vitreous electricity. One is concentrative in sparks and shocks: the other is diffuse strength; so that each disqualifies its workman for the other's duties.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

#17. Read proudly
put the duty of being read invariably on the author. If he is not read, whose fault is it? I am quite ready to be charmed, but I shall not make-believe I am charmed.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

#18. I should as soon think of swimming across Charles River, when I wish to go to Boston, as of reading all my books in originals, when I have them rendered for me in my mother tongue.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

#19. Be sure then to read no mean books. Shun the spawn of the press on the gossip of the hour. Do not read what you shall learn, without asking, in the street and the train.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

#20. I suppose every old scholar has had the experience of reading something in a book which was significant to him, but which he could never find again. Sure he is that he read it there, but no one else ever read it, nor can he find it again, though he buy the book and ransack every page.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

#21. We are too civil to books. For a few golden sentences we will turn over and actually read a volume of four or five hundred pages.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

#22. Let us answer a book of ink with a book of flesh and blood.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

#23. We often read with as much talent as we write.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

#24. For character, to prepare for the inevitable I recommend selections from [Ralph Waldo] Emerson. His writings have done for me far more than all other reading.

Rutherford B. Hayes

#25. Every word we speak is million-faced or convertible to an indefinite number of applications. If it were not so we could read no book. Your remark would only fit your case, not mine.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

#26. Every sentence spoken by Napoleon, and every line of his writing, deserves reading, as it is the sense of France.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

#27. We prize books, and they prize them most who are themselves wise.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

#28. An imaginative book renders us much more service at first, by stimulating us through its tropes, than afterward, when we arrive atthe precise sense of the author. I think nothing is of any value in books, excepting the transcendental and extraordinary.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

#29. Never read a book that is not a year old.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

#30. Neither is a dictionary a bad book to read. There is no can't in it, no excess of explanation, and it is full of suggestion, the raw material of possible poems and histories.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

#31. When fear enters the heart of a man at hearing the names of candidates and the reading of laws that are proposed, then is the State safe, but when these things are heard without regard, as above or below us, then is the Commonwealth sick or dead.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

#32. There is then creative reading as well as creative writing. When the mind is braced by labor and invention, the page of whatever book we read becomes luminous with manifold allusion. -Ralph Waldo Emerson, writer and philosopher (1803-1882)

Ralph Waldo Emerson

#33. It is with a good book as it is with good company.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

#34. I love to write, and I love to read too, but that doesn't mean I like to write about reading - 'cause nothing ruins the fun of reading a good story like the evil English army of Discuss, Analyze, and that hideous duo Compare and Contrast.

Kevin Emerson

#35. There is creative reading as well as creative writing.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

#36. I think I have done well, if I have acquired a new word from a good author; and my business with him is to find my own, though itwere only to melt him down into an epithet or an image for daily use.

Ralph Waldo Emerson