Hoyt & Roberts, comps. Hoyt’s New Cyclopedia of Practical Quotations. 1922.
Reading
Reading is to the mind, what exercise is to the body. As by the one, health is preserved, strengthened, and invigorated: by the other, virtue (which is the health of the mind) is kept alive, cherished, and confirmed.
Addison—The Tatler. No. 147.
Reading maketh a full man.
Bacon—Of Studies.
Read, mark, learn, and inwardly digest.
Book of Common Prayer. Collect for the Second Sunday in Advent.
In science, read, by preference, the newest works; in literature, the oldest. The classic literature is always modern.
Bulwer-Lytton—Caxtoniana. Hints on Mental Culture.
If time is precious, no book that will not improve by repeated readings deserves to be read at all.
Carlyle—Essays. Goethe’s Helena.
We have not read an author till we have seen his object, whatever it may be, as he saw it.
Carlyle—Essays. Goethe’s Helena.
The mind, relaxing into needful sport,
Should turn to writers of an abler sort,
Whose wit well managed, and whose classic style,
Give truth a lustre, and make wisdom smile.
Cowper—Retirement. L. 715.
But truths on which depends our main concern,
That ’tis our shame and misery not to learn,
Shine by the side of every path we tread
With such a lustre he that runs may read.
Cowper—Tirocinium. L. 77.
The delight of opening a new pursuit, or a new course of reading, imparts the vivacity and novelty of youth even to old age.
Isaac D’Israeli—Literary Character of Men of Genius. Ch. XXII.
I like to be beholden to the great metropolitan English speech, the sea which receives tributaries from every region under heaven. I should as soon think of swimming across the 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.
Emerson—Essays. Books.
If we encountered a man of rare intellect, we should ask him what books he read.
Emerson—Letters and Social Aims. Quotation and Originality.
Our high respect for a well-read man is praise enough of literature.
Emerson—Letters and Social Aims. Quotation and Originality.
My early and invincible love of reading,***I would not exchange for the treasures of India.
Gibbon—Memoirs.
The sagacious reader who is capable of reading between these lines what does not stand written in them, but is nevertheless implied, will be able to form some conception.
Goethe—Autobiography. Bk. XVIII. Truth and Beauty.
Zwar sind sie an das Beste nicht gewöhnt,
Allein sie haben schrecklich viel gelesen.
What they’re accustomed to is no great matter,
But then, alas! they’ve read an awful deal.
Goethe—Faust. Vorspiel auf dem Theater. L. 13. Bayard Taylor’s trans.
In a polite age almost every person becomes a reader, and receives more instruction from the Press than the Pulpit.
Goldsmith—The Citizen of the World. Letter LXXV.
The first time I read an excellent book, it is to me just as if I had gained a new friend. When I read over a book I have perused before, it resembles the meeting with an old one.
Goldsmith—The Citizen of the World. Letter LXXXIII.
Write the vision, and make it plain upon tables, that he may run that readeth it.
Habakkuk. II. 2. Ut percurrat qui legerit eum. (That he that readeth it may run over it.) Rendering in the Vulgate.
Books have always a secret influence on the understanding; we cannot at pleasure obliterate ideas: he that reads books of science, though without any desire fixed of improvement, will grow more knowing; he that entertains himself with moral or religious treatises, will imperceptibly advance in goodness; the ideas which are often offered to the mind, will at last find a lucky moment when it is disposed to receive them.
Samuel Johnson—The Adventurer. No. 137.
A man ought to read just as inclination leads him; for what he reads as a task will do him little good.
Samuel Johnson—Boswell’s Life of Johnson. (1763).
What is twice read is commonly better remembered than what is transcribed.
Samuel Johnson—The Idler. No. 74.
It may be well to wait a century for a reader, as God has waited six thousand years for an observer.
John Kepler—In Martyrs of Science. P. 197.
I love to lose myself in other men’s minds.
When I am not walking, I am reading;
I cannot sit and think. Books think for me.
Charles Lamb—Last Essays of Elia. Detached Thoughts on Books and Reading.
Night after night,
He sat and bleared his eyes with books.
Longfellow—Christus. The Golden Legend. Pt. I.
Many readers judge of the power of a book by the shock it gives their feelings.
Longfellow—Kavanagh. Ch. XIII.
Seria cum possim, quod delectantia malim
Scribere, tu causa es lector.
Thou art the cause, O reader, of my dwelling on lighter topics, when I would rather handle serious ones.
Martial—Epigrams. V. 16. 1.
His classical reading is great: he can quote
Horace, Juvenal, Ovid and Martial by rote.
He has read Metaphysics***Spinoza and Kant
And Theology too: I have heard him descant
Upon Basil and Jerome. Antiquities, art,
He is fond of. He knows the old masters by heart,
And his taste is refined.
Owen Meredith (Lord Lytton)—Lucile. Canto II. Pt. IV.
Who reads
Incessantly, and to his reading brings not
A spirit and judgment equal or superior,
(And what he brings what need he elsewhere seek?)
Uncertain and unsettled still remains,
Deep versed in books and shallow in himself,
Crude or intoxicate, collecting toys
And trifles for choice matters, worth a sponge,
As children gathering pebbles on the shore.
Milton—Paradise Regained. Bk. IV. L. 322.
He that I am reading seems always to have the most force.
Montaigne—Apology for Raimond Sebond
And better had they ne’er been born,
Who read to doubt, or read to scorn.
Scott—The Monastery. Ch. XII.
He hath never fed of the dainties that are bred in a book; he hath not eat paper, as it were; he hath not drunk ink: his intellect is not replenished; he is only an animal, only sensible in the duller parts.
Love’s Labour’s Lost. Act IV. Sc. 2. L. 26.
Read Homer once, and you can read no more,
For all books else appear so mean, so poor,
Verse will seem prose; but still persist to read,
And Homer will be all the books you need.
John Sheffield (Duke of Buckinghamshire)—An Essay on Poetry. L. 323.
He that runs may read.
Tennyson—The Flower. St. 5.
Studious let me sit,
And hold high converse with the mighty Dead.
Thomson—Seasons. Winter. L. 431.
Learn to read slow; all other graces
Will follow in their proper places.
Wm. Walker—Art of Reading.