Quotes about Reading

When you're reading the Word of God, you need to let it soak in and let God speak to your heart and let the Holy Spirit work.

There is a temperate zone in the mind, between luxurious indolence and exacting work; and it is to this region, just between laziness and labor, that summer reading belongs.

In old days books were written by men of letters and read by the public.  Nowadays books are written by the public and read by nobody.

It is a very ungentlemanly thing to read a private cigarette case. Algernon.  Oh! it is absurd to have a hard and fast rule about what one should read and what one shouldn't.  More than half of modern culture depends on what one shouldn't read. Jack.  I am quite aware of the fact, and I don't propose to discuss modern culture.  It isn't the sort of thing one should talk of in private. 

I am too fond of reading books to care to write them, Mr. Erskine. I should like to write a novel certainly, a novel that would be as lovely as a Persian carpet and as unreal. But there is no literary public in England for anything except newspapers, primers, and encyclopaedias. Of all people in the world the English have the least sense of the beauty of literature.

The Bible is, after all, God's gift to the world through his Church, not to the scholars. It comes through the life of his people and nourishes that life. Its purpose is practical, not academic. An intelligent, careful, intensive but straightforward reading—that is, one not governed by obscure and faddish theories or by a mindless orthodoxy—is what it requires to direct us into life in God's kingdom.

Be careful about reading health books. You may die of a misprint.

Today a reader, tomorrow a leader.

I'd had the idea, once, that if I could get the chance before I died I would read all the good books there were. Now I began to see that I wasn't apt to make it. This disappointed me, for I really wanted to read them all. But it consoled me in a way too; I could see that if I got them all read and had no more surprises in that line, I would have been sorry.

I have, to fill my mind and occupy my hands, the daily rounds of my economy. I have food to harvest and preserve in the summer and fall, firewood to gather and saw up and split in the fall and winter, the garden to prepare and plant in the spring. I have clothes and bedclothes to wash, and myself to keep clean and presentable. I have the endless little jobs of housekeeping and repair... I have books to read, and much to sit and watch.

You should approach Joyce's Ulysses as the illiterate Baptist preacher approaches the Old Testament: with faith.

It's not four days ago I find a bastard squatting here, asking me if I read books. Like he would jump me with a book or something. Take me for a ride with the telephone directory.