Top 100 Quotes About Reading Great Books
#1. Personal tranquility consists in the orderly structuring of the mind, which occurs whenever a person engages in the exquisite practice of contemplating personal experiences, harmonizing time spent with other people, reading great books, and working on self-improvement.
Kilroy J. Oldster
#2. Wisdom is not what comes from reading great books. When it comes to understanding life, experiential learning is the only worthwhile kind, everything else is hearsay.
Joan Erikson
#4. Literature, like anything else, can become a wearisome business if you make a lifetime specialty of it. A healthy, wholesome man would no more spend his entire life reading great books than he would packing cookies for Nabisco.
Edward Abbey
#6. I think instead writers and publishers and readers need to go to the places where people are, and make the argument that there is great value to the quiet, contemplative process of reading a novel, that reading great books carefully offers pleasures and consolations that no iPad app ever can.
John Green
#8. Thanks for being the kind of person who likes to pick up a book. That's a genuinely great thing. I met a librarian recently who said she doesn't read because books are her job and when she goes home, she just wants to switch off. I think we can agree that that's creepy as hell.
Max Barry
#9. I have been very interested in the number of kids who have read the Sherlock Holmes books after reading the Mary Russell books. That's great. That's more or less how I rediscovered the Holmes books.
Laurie R. King
#10. Reading well is one of the great pleasures that solitude can afford you.
Harold Bloom
#11. Three films a day, three books a week and records of great music would be enough to make me happy to the day I die.
Francois Truffaut
#13. Reading a book is like going on a great journey. You don't know what'll happen, but something is bound to change. And for me, that change has always been good.
Shannon Hale
#14. I get a glimpse of the mind of many souls from their sacred books.
Lailah Gifty Akita
#15. There were two sets of double doors leading out of the antechamber, one marked STACKS and the other TOMES. Not knowing the difference between the two, I headed to the ones labeled STACKS. That was what I wanted. Stacks of books. Great heaps of books. Shelf after endless shelf of books.
Patrick Rothfuss
#16. The reading of great books has been a life-altering activity to me and, for better or worse, brought me singing and language-obsessed to that country where I make my living. Except for teaching, I've had no other ambition in life than to write books that mattered.
Pat Conroy
#17. Great work doesn't make me jealous; it makes me want to work.
Glen Hirshberg
#18. Students learn best not by reading the Great Books in a closed room but by opening the doors and windows of experience.
Thomas Ehrlich
#19. My attraction to story is a ceaseless current that runs through the center of me. My inexhaustible ardor for reading seems connected to my hunger for storylines that show up in both books and in the great tumbling chaos of life.
Pat Conroy
#20. There are some great, subversive female writers out there. Gender should not affect anything. It does, but it shouldn't.
Carla H. Krueger
#21. Reading is one of life's great pleasures; talking about books keeps their worlds alive for longer.
Kate Morton
#22. This is natural: one must read Herodotus's book-and every great book-repeatedly; with each reading it will reveal another layer, previously overlooked themes, images, and meanings. For within every great book there are several others.
Ryszard Kapuscinski
#23. In great thick dusty books he read
And hardly ever went to bed
Before it was eleven.
- One Day When They Had Settled Down
Mervyn Peake
#24. In this job, there are some simple pleasures that really help you cope. One is books, I mean, books are a great escape. Books are a way to get your mind on something else.
George W. Bush
#25. One of the great things about books is sometimes there are some fantastic pictures.
George W. Bush
#26. It is no more necessary that a man should remember the different dinners and suppers which have made him healthy, than the different books which have made him wise. Let us see the results of good food in a strong body, and the results of great reading in a full and powerful mind.
Sydney Smith
#27. It was a great mistake to have come. He should have stayed at home and read his book, thought Peter Walsh; should have gone to a music hall; he should have stayed at home, for he knew no one.
Virginia Woolf
#28. I found out a long time ago that if I indulged by stuffing my face with great food, lying about reading books and watching TV or talking on the phone, I was not a happy camper.
Raquel Welch
#29. TV and film were always governing passions of mine, and that first wave of great HBO shows in the early years of the millennium was feeding my desire for fiction more than the books I was reading.
Nic Pizzolatto
#30. Life is short, but art is long. Sophocles is dead, but Oedipus lives on ... Each of us when we read a great piece of literature is a little more human than befor
James W. Sire
#32. A great library cannot be constructed; it is the growth of ages.
John Hill Burton
#33. Books have played a role in almost every one of the world's great civil and human rights movements, but only because people who read them decided to act. Reading brings with it responsibility.
Will Schwalbe
#35. Books have immortalized great minds. Books have kept ancients secrets alive. A world which least value books, least value the real essence of wisdom and least know how to preserve what is precious!
Ernest Agyemang Yeboah
#37. You may think that you don't want to read about the problems of being brought up Mennonite, but the great thing about books is that you'll read anything a good writer wants you to read.
Nick Hornby
#38. It would be so great to have someone my own age to talk to, even if it was just about books.
Alex Flinn
#39. 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.
Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
#40. Holly Barker series was a great read for me. Stuart gives short chapters and continued action all through his books.
Stuart Woods
#41. A good book, he had concluded, leaves you wanting to reread the book. A great book compels you to reread your own soul. Such books were for him rare and, as he aged, rarer. Still he searched, one more Ithaca for which he was forever bound.
Richard Flanagan
#42. I am eternally grateful for my knack of finding in great books, some of them very funny books, reason enough to feel honored to be alive, no matter what else might be going on.
Kurt Vonnegut
#43. Reading old Gray? That's right. Physician's library just three books: 'Gray's Anatomy' and Bible and Shakespeare. Study. You may become great doctor.
Sinclair Lewis
#44. Robert Pattinson reads all of the time and he refers so many great books.
Kellan Lutz
#45. The reading of great books awaken and brightens the light of my soul.
Lailah Gifty Akita
#46. I could read the great books but the great books don't interest me.
Charles Bukowski
#47. Reading a great novel gives the same feeling you have when you fall in love.
Luigina Sgarro
#48. Have you ever looked at, say, a picture or a great building or read a paragraph in a book and felt the world suddenly expand and, in the same instant, contract and harden into a kernel of perfect purity? Do you know what I mean? Everything suddenly fits, everything's in its place.
Carol Shields
#49. Great readers (are) those who know early that there is never going to be time to read all there is to read, but do their darnedest anyway.
Larry McMurtry
#50. The famous University of Chicago Great Books program and the reorganization of the University structure along Aristotelian lines and the establishment of the "College," in which a reading of classics was initiated in fifteen-year-old students, were some of the results.
Robert M. Pirsig
#51. I promote reading. I travel anywhere any time. In my books the indivuals face fears, issues, love, friendships, and are reminded qently that God is near! Great reads by Linda Green, Rosemary barkes,Liz Thompson, Richard Paul Evans
Susan Kay Box Brunner
#52. At Oxford University, I studied languages so I could read the great novels as they were originally written. I took what in the United States would be a double major in Russian and French, but I have to admit that the pressure of getting through so many books spoiled reading for me.
Kate Beckinsale
#53. It has always been a great comfort to me that I could bring a book anywhere, to any place. To any part of my life.
Anton DiSclafani
#54. Nothing can compare to the feeling evoked by turning the page in a great book.
Aneta Cruz
#55. The great sickness and the grievous evil consist in this: that all the things that man finds written in books, he presumes to think of as true-and all the more so if the books are old.
Maimonides
#56. A great book is one, which really don't finish when it finishes.
Aman Jassal
#57. E-books are great for instant gratification - you see a review somewhere of a book that interests you, and you can start reading it five minutes later.
Anne Lamott
#58. Time is a great teacher, but unfortunately it kills all its pupils ... - Louis Hector Berlioz
William L.K.
#59. Great bodies die but great minds don't die! Inside the tomb of great men lay dead body's but at the library of great men lay the living minds of dead bodies!
Ernest Agyemang Yeboah
#60. A great book should leave you with many experiences, and slightly exhausted at the end. You live several lives while reading.
William Styron
#61. I believe that today more than ever a book should be sought after even if it has only one great page in it. We must search for fragments, splinters, toenails, anything that has ore in it, anything that is capable of resuscitating the body and the soul.
Henry Miller
#62. The great thing about books was the solidity of the written word. You might change and your reading might change as a result, but the book remained whatever it had always been. A good book was surprising the first time through, less so the second.
Karen Joy Fowler
#63. She is a great gobbler of books, but reads only trash, memorizing nothing and leaving out the longer descriptions.
Vladimir Nabokov
#64. We spend great sum of money to buy good books, so that we can satisfy our pleasure of reading.
Lailah Gifty Akita
#66. That Wisedome is acquired, not by reading of Books, but of Men. Consequently whereunto, those persons, that for the most part can give no other proof of being wise, take great delight to shew what they think they have read in men, by uncharitable censures of one another behind their backs.
Thomas Hobbes
#67. It is fatal to suppose the great writer was too wise or too profound for us ever to understand him; to think of art so is not to praise but to murder it, for the next step after that tribute will be neglect of the masterpiece.
John Erskine
#68. But it is impossible, I find, to tidy books without ending by sitting on the floor in the middle of a great untidiness and reading.
Elizabeth Von Arnim
#69. Schools and parents can team up to find books that kids will really get excited about - that will make them say, 'That was a great experience. Now I know why people get excited about reading.'
James Patterson
#70. Reading is the basic springboard for learning. And books provide the liftoff. They are the great equalizer, opening up new worlds to everyone.
Mary Pope Osborne
#72. It takes a great reader to make a great book.
Orna Ross
#73. We give scholarships to high school kids and a new library of books to every preschool child in the county where I was born. I didn't have books at home so I did all my reading at school. I love books and I believe that helping kids to read gives them a great start in life.
Dolly Parton
#74. I've developed a great reputation for wisdom by ordering more books than I ever had time to read, and reading more books, by far, than I learned anything useful from, except, of course, that some very tedious gentlemen have written books.
Marilynne Robinson
#76. We find little in a book but what we put there. But in great books, the mind finds room to put many things.
Joseph Joubert
#77. There's always an anxiety about playing literary characters because one of the great joys of reading books is that you can create your own vision of things.
Stephen Mangan
#78. I intend to put up with nothing that I can put down.
[Letter to J. Beauchamp Jones, August 8, 1839]
Edgar Allan Poe
#79. Bea says that the art of reading is slowly dying, that it's an intimate ritual, that a book is a mirror that offers us only what we already carry inside us, that when we read, we do it with all our heart and mind, and great readers are becoming more scarce by the day.
Carlos Ruiz Zafon
#80. I'm a great reader that never has time to read.
Eudora Welty
#81. No one bothered reading the books and understanding - and again, I'm not being high-falutin' about it - but I think our books are great literature with great metaphors of real life dealing with fears and hopes.
Avi Arad
#82. It's a great blessing if one can lose all sense of time, all worries, if only for a short time, in a book.
Nella Last
#83. There was going to be a spot for me in this joint, the earth, after all. It was never going to be a great match for someone as bright and strange as me, but books were going to make it survivable.
Anne Lamott
#84. But why," he said with animation, "do the English not read their own great literature?"
Victor laughed triumphantly, and said, "Because at school they are made to hate it.
Olaf Stapledon
#85. In the 1970s and early '80s, Shanghai was quiet, cautious, a ghost of a once-great city - and yet physically, little was changed from its glittering heyday. When visiting, I enjoyed reading books on local history and used my time off to scope out the former haunts of gangsters and jazzmen.
Nicole Mones
#86. Her reputation for reading a great deal hung about her like the cloudy envelope of a goddess in an epic.
Henry James
#87. If we weigh the significance of a book by the effect it has on its readers, then the great children's books suddenly turn up very high on the list.
Laura Miller
#88. My depth of purse is not so great
Nor yet my bibliophilic greed,
That merely buying doth elate:
The books I buy I like to read:
Still e'en when dawdling in a mead,
Beneath a cloudless summer sky,
By bank of Thames, or Tyne, or Tweed,
The books I read - I like to buy.
A. Edward Newton
#89. In 1969, we emigrated to Australia. It was a big change. The heat, the flies, and the completely different tinned meats. The shock was so great, I stopped reading books for nearly a year.
Morris Gleitzman
#90. Books are the legacies that a great genius leaves to
mankind, which are delivered down from generation to
generation as presents to the posterity of those who are yet unborn
Joseph Addison
#92. I find great consolation in having a lot of poetry books around. I believe that writing poetry and reading it are deeply intertwined. I've always delighted in the company of the poets I've read.
Edward Hirsch
#93. Sometimes he spent hours together in the great libraries of Paris, those catacombs of departed authors, rummaging among their hoards of dusty and obsolete works in quest of food for his unhealthy appetite. He was, in a manner, a literary ghoul, feeding in the charnel-house of decayed literature.
Washington Irving
#94. I was not a comic book reader, but my son is. My son wasn't really interested in reading books, which was hard for me because I love to read. It just didn't come naturally to my boy. So we kind of found comic books because they were fascinating to him. They were great stories.
Virginia Madsen
#95. A reader of mine is a deluxe reader, not because I'm so great but because in order to get to me you have to take a path through literature, not through some books bought out of curiosity at the bookstore. A reader of mine has to have read other things.
Cesar Aira
#96. So many great books to read, when will I finish reading all these books?
Lailah Gifty Akita
#97. There's always these giant baffling books, like 'The Da Vinci Code.' People say it's not as well written as 'Midnight's Children.' Why aren't people reading 'Midnight's Children?' Nobody knows why these phenomenons happen but they're great.
Denise Mina
#99. Reading is the royal road to intellectual eminence ... Truly good books are more than mines to those who can understand them. They are the breathings of the great souls of past times. Genius is not embalmed in them, but lives in them perpetually.
William Ellery Channing
