top of page
.png){kind=small}
"When you read a classic, you do not see more in the book than you did before; you see more in you than there was before."
Standard
Customized
Exlpore more Reading quotes
"What a vast fertility of pleasure books hold for me! I went in and found the table laden with books. I looked in and sniffed them all. I could not resist carrying this one off and broaching it. I think I could happily live here and read forever."
"It would be a good thing to buy books if one could also buy the time to read them, but one usually confuses the purchase of books with the acquisition of their contents."
"And what is the use of a book," thought Alice, "without pictures or conversation?"
"Back at the Chateau Windsor there was a rat-like scratching at the door of my room. Vinod, the youngest servant, came in with a soda water. He placed it next to the bag of toffees. Then he watched me read. I was used to being observed reading. Sometimes the room would fill like a railway station at rush hour and I would be expected to cure widespread boredom."
"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."
"If time is precious, no book that will not improve by repeated readings deserves to be read at all."
"And every book, you find, has its own social group--friends of its own it wants to introduce you to, like a party in the library that need never, ever end."
Explore more quotes by Clifton Fadiman
"I tried to use the questions and answers as an armature on which to build a sculpture of genuine conversation."
"Insomnia is a gross feeder. It will nourish itself on any kind of thinking, including thinking about not thinking."
"By the end of high school I was not of course an educated man, but I knew how to try to become one."
"Experience teaches you that the man who looks you straight in the eye, particularly if he adds a firm handshake, is hiding something."
"For most men, life is a search for the proper manila envelope in which to get themselves filed."
bottom of page