Books & Reading Quotes — page 5

When I am dead, I hope it may be said: 'His sins were scarlet, But his books were read'.

The grateful savants had accepted, and they were spending the rest of their lives reading fifteenth-hand opinions, taking pleasant naps, and drooling out to yawning students the anemic and wordy bookishness which they called learning.

There are many persons of combative tendencies, who read for ammunition, and dig out of the Bible iron for balls.

Writing ought either to be the manufacture of stories for which there is a market demand — a business as safe and commendable as making soap or breakfast foods — or it should be an art, which is always a search for something for which …

The book of female logic is blotted all over with tears, and Justice in their courts is for ever in a passion.

From a Child I was fond of Reading, and all the little Money that came into my Hands was ever laid out in Books.

The elaborate argument against the constitutionality of the Act if interpreted as we read it, in accordance with its obvious meaning does not need an elaborate answer.

The applause of list'ning senates to command, The threats of pain and ruin to despise, To scatter plenty o'er a smiling land, And read their hist'ry in a nation's eyes.

The most sacred duty is filial piety. “God showers his blessings on him who honors and reveres the author of his days,” says Pampelus (De Parentibus, Orelli, op. Cit., ii, 345). Ingratitude towards one’s parents is the blackest of all …

It's like a book, I think, this bloomin' world, Which you can read and care for just so long, But presently you feel that you will die Unless you get the page you're readin' done, An' turn another—likely not so good; But what you're after …

Nobody, I think, ought to read poetry, or look at pictures or statues, who cannot find a great deal more in them than the poet or artist has actually expressed.

Never mind what two tons refers to. What is it? How has it entered in so definite a way into our exprerience? Two tons is the reading of the pointer when the elephant was placed on a weighing machine. Let us pass on. … And so we see that …

'Either,' said he, 'these were terriginous, or if otherwise, the animals they so exactly represent have become extinct. This writer appears to have been the first who was aware of the continuity over large districts of the principal groups …

I have read it with the deepest appreciation of Mr. Herron's singular insight into all the elements of a complicated situation and into my own motives and purposes.

The bower we shrined to Tennyson, Gentlemen, Is roof-wrecked; damps there drip upon Sagged seats, the creeper-nails are rust, The spider is sole denizen; Even she who read those rhymes is dust,

If anything delight me for to print My book, 'tis this: that Thou, my God, art in't.

But truths on which depends our main concern, That 'tis our shame and mistery not to learn, Shine by the side of every path we tread With such a luster, he that runs may read.

Few books have exercised so pernicious an influence upon the general development of economic thought as Malthus's Essay on the Principle of Population

sense of what life honestly and deeply means. It is only partly got from books; it is our individual way of just seeing and feeling the total push and pressure of the cosmos.

My way hither was the way of destiny; for I am he of whose genius you are the symbol: part brute, part woman, and part God — nothing of man in me at all. Have I read your riddle, Sphinx?

A capacity, and taste, for reading, gives access to whatever has already been discovered by others. It is the key, or one of the keys, to the already solved problems. And not only so. It gives a relish, and facility, for successfully …

No book exists, however bad, From which some good may not be had.

How poor remembrances are statues, tombs, And other monuments that men erect To princes, which remain in closèd rooms Where but a few behold them, in respect Of Books, that to the universal eye Show how they lived; the other where they lie!

In the Diary which begins 1845 there is a much larger infusion of secular matter. I find myself deep in the literary history of the eighteenth century, reading Gray's Correspondence, Prior's Life of Goldsmith, Hume's Life and …