Social proof
What notable people say about reading
16 quotes, each with the work, the year and a link. The reading quotes that circulate most widely are mostly invented, so the rule here is simple: no source, no quote. Three famous fakes are named at the bottom rather than quietly omitted.
Bold is ours, not theirs. The emphasis in these quotes was added here, to make a long passage skimmable on a phone. Not a word has been changed: the site can only bold a phrase that already appears in the quote, and a passage it fails to match loses its emphasis rather than its accuracy.
What a book is
What an astonishing thing a book is. It’s a flat object made from a tree with flexible parts on which are imprinted lots of funny dark squiggles. But one glance at it and you’re inside the mind of another person, maybe somebody dead for thousands of years. Across the millennia, an author is speaking clearly and silently inside your head, directly to you. […] Books break the shackles of time. A book is proof that humans are capable of working magic.
The reading of all good books is like a conversation with the finest minds of past centuries.
Books are the way that we communicate with the dead. The way that we learn lessons from those who are no longer with us, that humanity has built on itself, progressed, made knowledge incremental rather than something that has to be relearned, over and over.
What reading does to you
You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read. It was books that taught me that the things that tormented me most were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive, or who had ever been alive.
A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us.
At a time when events move so quickly and so much information is transmitted, the ability to slow down and get perspective, along with the ability to get in somebody else’s shoes — those two things have been invaluable to me.
Reading fuels a sense of curiosity about the world, which I think helped drive me forward in my career and in the work that I do now with my foundation.
In reading great literature I become a thousand men and yet remain myself. […] Here, as in worship, in love, in moral action, and in knowing, I transcend myself; and am never more myself than when I do.
We read books to find out who we are. What other people, real or imaginary, do and think and feel […] is an essential guide to our understanding of what we ourselves are and may become.
We are not only what we read. We are how we read.
The habit
In my whole life, I have known no wise people (over a broad subject matter area) who didn’t read all the time — none, zero.
Read 500 pages like this every day. That’s how knowledge works. It builds up, like compound interest. All of you can do it, but I guarantee not many of you will do it.
I was raised by books. Books, and then my parents.
Read what you love until you love to read.
What to read
If you only read the books that everyone else is reading, you can only think what everyone else is thinking.
Spoken by the character Nagasawa, not in the author’s own voice.
Read books are far less valuable than unread ones. The library should contain as much of what you do not know as your financial means […] allow you to put there.
Three the internet gets wrong
If you have shared any of these, so has everybody. They are here because a page arguing that books make you better informed should not be sloppy about who said what.
The man who does not read has no advantage over the man who cannot read.
Usually attributed to Mark Twain
Not in Twain’s published work, his letters, or The Quotable Mark Twain’s 1,800 verified quotations. Quote Investigator’s earliest match is an unattributed 1914 trade-magazine item; the first ascription to Twain appears in 1945, 35 years after he died.
We read to know we are not alone.
Usually attributed to C. S. Lewis
Written by William Nicholson for Shadowlands, the play and 1993 film about Lewis. In the film it is not even said by Lewis — a student attributes it to his own father. Lewis wrote something adjacent and better in An Experiment in Criticism; it is quoted above.
A reader lives a thousand lives before he dies. The man who never reads lives only one.
Usually attributed to George R. R. Martin
Said by Jojen Reed in A Dance with Dragons — a line of dialogue from a character, which is a different thing from the author’s stated view. Quote the character.
Saying it is easy. Doing it leaves a trail.
A quote is cheap. What someone reads when nobody is grading them is not — and it is a matter of public record for a surprising number of people.