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"One can never read too little of bad, or too much of good books: bad books are intellectual poison; they destroy the mind.In order to read what is good one must make it a condition never to read what is bad; for life is short, and both time and strength limited."
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"By reading Huckleberry Finn I felt I was able to justify my act of going into the mountain forest at night and sleeping among the trees with a sense of security which I could never find indoors."
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Personal Development

"You can't get a cup of tea big enough or a book long enough to suit me."
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Personal Development

"There is no other enjoyment like reading."
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Personal Development

"One must be an inventor to read well. There is then creative reading as well as creative writing."
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Personal Development

"A learned man is a sedentary, concentrated solitary enthusiast, who searches through books to discover some particular grain of truth upon which he has set his heart. If the passion for reading conquers him, his gains dwindle and vanish between his fingers. A reader, on the other hand, must check the desire for learning at the outset; if knowledge sticks to him well and good, but to go in pursuit of it, to read on a system, to become a specialist or an authority, is very apt to kill what suits us to consider the more humane passion for pure and disinterested reading."
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Personal Development

"I read anything that's going to be interesting. But you don't know what it is until you've read it. Somewhere in a book on the history of false teeth there'll be the making of a novel."
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Personal Development

"Books smell and feel better. They have that wonderful thingness of turning the pages."
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Personal Development

"It can't be supposed," said Joe. "Tho' I'm oncommon fond of reading, too."Are you, Joe?"Oncommon. Give me," said Joe, "a good book, or a good newspaper, and sit me down afore a good fire, and I ask no better. Lord!" he continued, after rubbing his knees a little, "when you do come to a J and a O, and says you, 'Here, at last, is a J-O, Joe,' how interesting reading is!"
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Personal Development

"The true reader reads every work seriously in the sense that he reads it whole-heartedly, makes himself as receptive as he can. But for that very reason he cannot possibly read every work solemly or gravely. For he will read 'in the same spirit that the author writ.'... He will never commit the error of trying to munch whipped cream as if it were venison."
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Personal Development

"Ah, how good it is to be among people who are reading."
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"As the biggest library if it is in disorder is not as useful as a small but well-arranged one, so you may accumulate a vast amount of knowledge but it will be of far less value than a much smaller amount if you have not thought it over for yourself."
Thought

"Honor has not to be won; it must only not be lost."
Honor

"It is in the treatment of trifles that a person shows what they are."
Relationship

"For an author to write as he speaks is just as reprehensible as the opposite fault, to speak as he writes; for this gives a pedantic effect to what he says, and at the same time makes him hardly intelligible."
Time

"With people of limited ability modesty is merely honesty. But with those who possess great talent it is hypocrisy."
Talent

"The word of man is the most durable of all material."
Man

"Politeness is to human nature what warmth is to wax."
Nature

"Patriotism, when it wants to make itself felt in the domain of learning, is a dirty fellow who should be thrown out of doors."
Patriotism

"They tell us that suicide is the greatest piece of cowardice... that suicide is wrong; when it is quite obvious that there is nothing in the world to which every man has a more unassailable title than to his own life and person."
Life

"To free a person from error is to give, and not to take away."
Knowledge
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