Reading

• “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 pursuing the [yet] unsolved ones.” — September 30, 1859 - Lincoln’s Address before the Wisconsin State Agricultural Society
• Books serve to show a man that those original thoughts of his aren’t very new at all. ~ Abraham Lincoln
• The worth of a book is to be measured by what you can carry away from it. ~ James Bryce
• Books are the quietest and most constant of friends; they are the most accessible and wisest of counselors, and the most patient of teachers. ~ Charles W. Eliot
• The man who does not read good books has no advantage over the man who can’t read them. ~ Mark Twain, attributed
• How many a man has dated a new era in his life from the reading of a book. ~ Henry David Thoreau, Walden
• Books are the bees which carry the quickening pollen from one to another mind. ~ James Russell Lowell
• Books are the compasses and telescopes and sextants and charts which other men have prepared to help us navigate the dangerous seas of human life. ~ Jesse Lee Bennett
• A book is a garden, an orchard, a storehouse, a party, a company by the way, a counsellor, a multitude of counsellors. ~ Henry Ward Beecher
• To acquire the habit of reading is to construct for yourself a refuge from almost all the miseries of life. ~ W. Somerset Maugham
• Except a living man there is nothing more wonderful than a book! A message to us from the dead, - from human souls whom we never saw, who lived perhaps thousands of miles away; and yet these, on those little sheets of paper, speak to us, teach us, comfort us, open their hearts to us as brothers. ~ Charles Kingsley
• A truly good book teaches me better than to read it. I must soon lay it down, and commence living on its hint…. What I began by reading, I must finish by acting. ~ Henry David Thoreau
• “Reading a couple hundred books a year is the bare minimum. It’s just the baseline. You also need to be embedded in a community of others who have diverse perspectives to bounce your ideas off of. The key for autodidact-types is to set up ways to avoid insularity.” — Alan Kay
• “I can’t imagine a man really enjoying a book and reading it only once.” ― C.S. Lewis
• “The reading of all good books is like conversation with the finest men of past centuries.” ― René Descartes
• “Sit in a room and read—and read and read. And read the right books by the right people. Your mind is brought onto that level, and you have a nice, mild, slow-burning rapture all the time.” — Joseph Campbell

“Every reader, as he reads, is actually the reader of himself. The writer’s work is only a kind of optical instrument he provides the reader so he can discern what he might never have seen in himself without this book. The reader’s recognition in himself of what the book says is the proof of the book’s truth.” ― Marcel Proust, [Time Regained]

“Reading is that fruitful miracle of a communication in the midst of solitude.” ― Marcel Proust

“My illusions about the world caused me to think that in order to benefit by my reading I ought to possess all the knowledge the book presupposed. I was very far indeed from imagining that often the author did not possess it himself, but had extracted it from other books, as and when he needed it. This foolish conviction forced me to stop every moment, and to rush incessantly from one book to another; sometimes before coming to the tenth page of the one I was trying to read I should, by this extravagant method, have had to run through whole libraries. Nevertheless I stuck to it so persistently that I wasted infinite time, and my head became so confused that I could hardly see or take in anything.”
― Jean Jacques Rousseau, Confessions