thoughts on books and reading

As the idea guiding this blog is to give advice on books, I thought it might be a good thing to give some advice on the art of reading as well.

Obviously it will not be me giving it, i’m not in the position to give advice on such a complex issue, but I’ll let some “friends” do it instead…

And reading what they say, you might find something that strikes you, and maybe brings you to follow new reading paths…

…and who knows where they might take you.

This is only a very brief selection, but there will be more .

You don't have to burn books to destroy a culture.
Just get people to stop reading them.
Ray Bradbury

There are worse crimes than burning books. One of them is not reading them.
Joseph Brodsky

The strongest memory is weaker than the palest ink.
Chines proverb

Force yourself to reflect on what you read, paragraph by paragraph.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge

The reading of all good books is like conversation with the finest men of past centuries.
Rene Descartes

Read in order to live.
Gustave Flaubert

The dear good people don’t know how long it takes to learn to read. I’ve been at it eighty years, and can’t say yet that I’ve reached the goal.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

The proper study of mankind is books.
Aldous Huxley

Every man who knows how to read has it in him power to magnify himself, to multiply the ways in which he exists, to make his life full, significant, and interesting.
Aldous Huxley

A book ought to be an icepick to break up the frozen sea within us.
Franz Kafka

I have good reason to be content,
for thank God I can read and
perhaps understand Shakespeare to his depths.
John Keats

I am a part of everything that I have read.
John Kieran

Reading furnishes the mind only with materials for knowledge;
it is thinking that makes what we read ours.
John Locke

The world exists to be put in a book.
Stephane Mallarme

He who destroys a good book kills reason itself.
John Milton

I’ve never known any trouble that an hour's reading didn't assuage.
Montesquieu

Until one has some kind of professional relationship with books, one does not discover how bad the majority of them are.
George Orwell

Desultory reading is delightful, but to be beneficial, our reading must be carefully directed.
Seneca

Employ your time in improving yourself by other men's writing so that you shall come easily by what others have labored hard for.
Socrates

Book love, my friends, is your pass to the greatest, the purest, and the most perfect pleasure that God has prepared for His creatures.
Anthony Trollope

Classic. A book which people praise and don't read.
Mark Twain

The multitude of books is making us ignorant.

Voltaire

What harm can a book do that costs a hundred crowns?
Twenty volumes folio will never cause a revolution;
it is the little portable volumes of thirty sous that are to be feared.
Voltaire