Quotes about books and reading

• Properly, we should read for power. Man reading should be man intensely alive. The book should be a ball of light in one's hand. - Ezra Pound
• Woe be to him that reads but one book. - George Herbert
• A book is a version of the world. If you do not like it, ignore it; or offer your own version in return. - Salman Rushdie
• Some books are undeservedly forgotten; none are undeservedly remembered. - W. H. Auden
• A book burrows into your life in a very profound way because the experience of reading is not passive. - Erica Jong
• Reading furnishes the mind only with materials of knowledge; it is thinking that makes what we read ours. - John Locke
• If the riches of the Indies, or the crowns of all the kingdom of Europe, were laid at my feet in exchange for my love of reading, I would spurn them all. - Francois de Fenelon
• The pleasure of all reading is doubled when one lives with another who shares the same books. - Katherine Mansfield
• Read the best books first, or you may not have a chance to read them all. - Henry David Thoreau
• We shouldn't teach great books; we should teach a love of reading. - B. F. Skinner
• We read to know we are not alone. - C. S. Lewis
• Books are not seldom talismans and spells. - William Cowper
• Books are like imprisoned souls till someone takes them down from a shelf and frees them. - Samuel Butler
• Even bad books are books and therefore sacred. - Günther Grass
• I enjoy books as misers enjoy treasures, because I know I can enjoy them whenever I please. - Michel de Montaigne
• Fairy tales are more than true: not because they tell us that dragons exist, but because they tell us that dragons can be beaten. - G. K. Chesterton
• A room without books is like a body without a soul. - G. K. Chesterton
• ... the creek runs on all night, ... as a closed book on a shelf continues to whisper to itself its own inexhaustible tale. - Annie Dillard
• Good books, like good friends, are few and chosen. - Louisa May Alcott
• A reading, which has pleased, will please when repeated ten times. - Horace
• Reading maketh a full man. -Francis Bacon
• Books are meat and medicine/ and flame and flight and flower/ steel, stitch, cloud and clout,/ and drumbeats on the air. - Gwendolyn Brooks
• Literature is a luxury; fiction is a necessity. - G. K. Chesterton