He that runs may read. [ Tennyson ]
Who is it can read a woman? [ William Shakespeare ]
Read much, but not many works. [ Sir W. Hamilton ]
I GREET you as host!
Unfold the pages of my heart
And read therein your welcome. [ Ben Jonson ]
Read my little fable:
He that runs may read.
Most can raise the flowers now,
For all have got the seed. [ Tennyson ]
Happiest they of human race,
To whom God has granted grace
To read, to fear, to hope, to pray,
To lift the latch and force the way;
And better had they ne'er been born,
Who read to doubt, or read to scorn. [ Scott ]
Learn to read slow; all other graces
Will follow in their proper places. [ Wm. Walker ]
And better had they never been born.
Who read to doubt, or read to scorn. [ Scott ]
Heaven
Is as the Book of God before thee set,
Wherein to read His wondrous works. [ Milton ]
The heart's letter is read in the eyes. [ English Proverb, collected by George Herbert ]
Why read a book which you cannot quote? [ Bentley ]
Read, mark, learn, and inwardly digest. [ Collect ]
Books think for me.
I can read anything which I call a book. [ Lamb ]
Nature hath made nothing so base but can
Read some instruction to the wisest man. [ Aleyn ]
Women read each other at a single glance. [ Rivarol ]
Read nature; nature is a friend to truth;
Nature is Christian, preaches to mankind;
And bids dead matter aid us in our creed. [ Young ]
Read well-written books aloud to children. [ Ada Ellen Bayly, a.k.a. Edna Lyall, English novelist and early feminist, The Art Of Authorship, 1891 ]
I love vast libraries; yet there is a doubt,
If one be better with them or without -
Unless he use them wisely, and, indeed,
Knows the high art of what and how to read. [ J. G. Saxe ]
Your face, my Thane, is as a book, where men
May read strange matters. [ William Shakespeare ]
Read not my blemishes in the world's report. [ William Shakespeare ]
When a new book comes out, I read an old one. [ Rogers ]
Ah me! for aught that ever I could read ...
The course of true love never did run smooth. [ William Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night's Dream ]
Ay me! for aught that ever I could read,
Could ever hear by tale or history,
The course of true love never did run smooth. [ William Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night's Dream ]
Only a newspaper! Quick read, quick lost.
Who sums the treasure that it carries hence?
Torn, trampled under feet, who counts thy cost,
Star-eyed Intelligence. [ Mary Clemmer ]
How well he is read, to reason against reading! [ William Shakespeare ]
Greatness, once fallen out with fortune,
Must fall out with men too; what the declined is,
He shall as soon read in the eyes of others
As feel in his own fall. [ William Shakespeare, Troilus and Cressida ]
Read Homer once, and you can read no more,
For all books else appear so mean, so poor.
Verse will seem prose, but still persist to read,
And Homer will be all the books you need. [ John Sheffield ]
Every man is a volume if you know bow to read him. [ Channing ]
Pray thee, take care, that tak'st my book in hand,
To read it well; that is to understand. [ Ben Jonson ]
People will not be better than the books they read. [ Bishop Potter ]
Men must read for amusement as well as for knowledge. [ Henry Ward Beecher ]
For there's nothing we read of in torture's inventions,
Like a well-meaning dunce, with the best of intentions. [ Lowell ]
The most annoying of all blockheads is a well-read fool. [ Bayard Taylor ]
Other men are lenses through which we read our own minds. [ Emerson ]
And let him who cannot understand me learn to read better. [ Johann Wolfgang von Goethe ]
In science read the newest works; in literature, the oldest. [ Bulwer Lytton ]
To read without reflecting is like eating without digesting. [ Burke ]
He that would right understand a man must read his whole story. [ Proverb ]
Be as careful of the books you read as of the company you keep. [ Paxton Hood ]
An indiscreet man is an unsealed letter: every one can read it. [ Chamfort ]
No book can be so good, as to be profitable when negligently read. [ Seneca ]
Force yourself to reflect on what you read, paragraph by paragraph. [ Coleridge ]
Our high respect for a well-read man is praise enough of literature. [ Emerson ]
To try to conceal our own heart, is a bad means to read that of others. [ Rousseau ]
Of those which you read, some are good, some middling, and more are bad. [ Mart., of books ]
The world is a beautiful book, but of little use to him who cannot read it. [ Goldoni ]
I will look on the stars and look on thee, and read the page of thy destiny. [ L. E. Landon ]
You read of but one wise man; and all that he knew was that he knew nothing. [ Congreve ]
Old wood to burn, old wine to drink, old friends to trust, old books to read. [ Alonzo of Arragon ]
No man can read with profit that which he cannot learn to read with pleasure. [ Noah Porter ]
No book that will not improve by repeated readings deserves to be read at all. [ Carlyle ]
'T is the good reader that makes the good book: a good head cannot read amiss. [ Emerson ]
If we encounter a man of rare intellect, we should ask him what books he read. [ Emerson ]
It is nearly an axiom that people will not be better than the books they read. [ Dr. Potter ]
Uncertain whose the narrowest span, - the clown unread, or half-read gentleman. [ Dryden ]
He that can read and meditate, need not think the evenings long, or life tedious. [ Proverb ]
O heaven! that one might read the book of fate, and see the revolution of the times. [ William Shakespeare ]
A man who attempts to read all the new productions must do as the flea does, - skip. [ Rogers ]
If a man read little, he had need have much cunning to seem to know that he doth not. [ Bacon ]
He is a worthy gentleman, exceedingly well read and profited in strange concealments. [ Shakespeare ]
Old wood best to burn, old wine to drink, old friends to trust, and old authors to read. [ Bacon ]
We have not read an author till we have seen his object, whatever it may be, as he saw it [ Carlyle ]
Wise men read very sharply all of your private history in your look and gait and behavior. [ Emerson ]
In my domain there have been learned men, but outside their breviary they could read nothing. [ Johann Wolfgang von Goethe ]
Teach a man to read and write, and you have put into his hands the great keys of the wisdom-box. [ Huxley ]
Half the gossip of society would perish if the books that are truly worth reading were but read. [ George Dawson ]
Truth is always present: it only needs to lift the iron lids of the minds eye to read its oracles. [ Ralph Waldo Emerson ]
If time is precious. no book that will not improve by repeated readings deserves to be read at all. [ Carlyle ]
Often turn the stile (correct with care) if you expect to write anything worthy of being read twice. [ Horace ]
Reading furnishes the mind only with materials of knowledge; it is thinking makes what we read ours. [ John Locke ]
Read and take your nourishment in at your eyes; shut up your mouth and chew the cud of understanding. [ Congreve ]
The balls of sight are so formed that one man's eyes are spectacles to another to read his heart with. [ Johnson ]
We read that we ought to forgive our enemies; but we do not read that we ought to forgive our friends. [ Cosmus ]
A man ought to read just as inclination leads him; for what he reads as a task will do him little good. [ Sam'l Johnson ]
I will govern my life and my thoughts as if the whole world were to see the one, and to read the other. [ Seneca ]
The test or measure of poetic genius is to read the poetry of affairs, to fuse the circumstance of today. [ Ralph Waldo Emerson ]
Our human laws are but the copies, more or less imperfect, of the eternal laws so far as we can read them. [ Froude ]
Petitions, not sweetened with gold, are but unsavory and oft refused: or, if received, are pocketed, not read. [ Massinger ]
If you would understand your own age, read the works of fiction produced in it. People in disguise speak freely. [ Arthur Helps ]
We are now in want of an art to teach how books are to be read rather than to read them. Such an art is practicable. [ Disraeli ]
In science, read by preference the newest works; in literature, the oldest. The classic literature is always modern. [ Edward Bulwer-Lytton ]
Read, read, sirrah, and refine your appetite; learn to live upon instruction; frost your mind and mortify your flesh. [ Congreve ]
If thou wilt receive profit, read with humility, simplicity, and faith: and seek not at any time the fame of being learned. [ Thomas a Kempis ]
God hath blessed you with a good name: to be a well-favored man is the gift of fortune, but to write and read comes by nature. [ William Shakespeare ]
All the gazers on the skies read not in fair heaven's story expresser truth or truer glory than they might in her bright eyes. [ Ben Jonson ]
God sometimes washes the eyes of His children with tears in order that they may read aright His providence and His commandments. [ T. L. Cuyller ]
In a heavy oppressive atmosphere, when the spirits sink too low, the best cordial is to read over all the letters of one's friends. [ Shenstone ]
Read not to contradict and confute, nor to believe and take for granted, nor to find talk and discourse; but to weigh and consider. [ Bacon ]
Let us read with method, and propose to ourselves an end to what our studies may point. The use of reading is to aid us in thinking. [ Gibbon ]
Fine natures are like fine poems; a glance at the first two lines suffices for a guess into the beauty that waits you if you read on. [ Edward Bulwer-Lytton ]
Many books require no thought from those who read them, and for a simple reason, - they made no such demand upon those who wrote them. [ Colton ]
Nor or Or? These conjunctions are often confused. Example: I can neither read or write.
In this sentence or is incorrectly used for nor. [ Pure English, Hackett And Girvin, 1884 ]
No book is worth anything which is not worth much; nor is it serviceable until it has been read, and re-read, and loved, and loved again. [ John Ruskin ]
If we could read the secret history of our enemies we should find in each man's life sorrow and suffering enough to disarm all hostility. [ Longfellow ]
At the age of sixty, to marry a beautiful girl of sixteen, is to imitate those ignorant people who buy books to be read by their friends. [ A. Ricard ]
When we read that the lost sheep is preferred to the rest of the flock, we are tempted to think that penitence is preferable to innocence.
The narrow sectarian cannot read astronomy with impunity. The creeds of his church shrivel like dried leaves at the door of the observatory. [ Emerson ]
The art of declamation has been sinking in value from the moment that speakers were foolish enough to publish, and hearers wise enough to read. [ Colton ]
Be as careful of the books you read as of the company you keep, for your habits and character will be as much influenced by the former as the latter. [ Paxton Hood ]
We never read without profit if with the pen or pencil in our hand we mark such ideas as strike us by their novelty, or correct those we already possess. [ Zimmermann ]
Had he not long read the heart's hushed secret in the soft, dark eye, lighted at his approach, and on the cheek, coloring all crimson at his lightest look? [ L. E. Landon ]
The idiot, the Indian, the child, and unschooled farmer's boy stand nearer to the light by which nature is to be read, than the dissector or the antiquary. [ Emerson ]
Nothing lives in literature but that which has in it the vitality of the creative art; and it would be safe advice to the young to read nothing but what is old. [ K P. Whipple ]
No man reads a book of science from pure inclination. The books that we do read with pleasure are light compositions, which contain a quick succession of events. [ Dr. Johnson ]
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. [ Oscar Wilde, The Importance of Being Earnest ]
Plays and romances sell as well as books of devotion, but with this difference, - more people read the former than buy them, and more buy the latter than read them. [ T. Hughes ]
Read the best authors attentively - Bacon, Locke, Hume, Berkeley, Jeremy Taylor, and of moderns, Walter Scott, Bulwer, Thackeray, Ruskin, Froude; and practice constantly. [ George Rawlinson, The Art Of Authorship, 1891 ]
When what you read elevates your mind and fills you with noble aspirations, look for no other rule by which to judge a book; it is good, and is the work of a master-hand. [ La Bruyere ]
True glory consists in doing what deserves to be written, in writing what deserves to be read, and in so living as to make the world happier and better for our living in it. [ Pliny ]
Those who are too idle to read, save for the purpose of amusement, may in these works acquire some acquaintance with history, which, however inaccurate, is better than none. [ Sir Walter Scott ]
If a man begins to read in the middle of a book, and feels an inclination to go on, let him not quit it to go to the beginning. He may perhaps not feel again the inclination. [ Dr. Johnson ]
Women always show more taste in adorning others than themselves; and the reason is that their persons are like their hearts - they read another's better that they can their own. [ Richter ]
To have read the greatest works of any great poet, to have beheld or heard the greatest works of any great painter or musician, is a possession added to the best things of life. [ Swinburne ]
One of the amusements of idleness is reading without the fatigue of close attention; and the world, therefore, swarms with writers whose wish is not to be studied, but to be read. [ Johnson ]
The first time I read an excellent book, it is to me just as if I had gained a new friend. When I read over a book I have perused before, it resembles the meeting with an old one. [ Goldsmith ]
Plutarch would rather we should applaud his judgment than commend his knowledge, and would rather leave us with an appetite to read more than glutted with that we have already read. [ Montaigne ]
Whenever I am in doubt about a sentence I read it aloud to see how it sounds, and indeed, always read the whole book through aloud, sometimes more than once, before it goes to the press. [ Ada Ellen Bayly, a.k.a. Edna Lyall, English novelist and early feminist, The Art Of Authorship, 1891 ]
A friend is a rare book, of which but one copy is made. We read a page of it every day, till some woman snatches it from our hands, who sometimes peruses it, but more frequently tears it.
A book is a friend whose face is constantly changing. If you read it when you are recovering from an illness, and return to it years after, it is changed surely, with the change in yourself. [ Andrew Lang ]
'Tis the good reader that makes the good book; a good head cannot read amiss; in every book he finds passages which seem confidences, or asides, hidden from all else and unmistakably meant for his ear. [ Ralph Waldo Emerson ]
The words in prose ought to express the intended meaning; if they attract attention to themselves, it is a fault; in the very best styles, as Southey's, you read page after page without noticing the medium. [ Coleridge ]
We read of a fountain in Arabia upon whose basin is inscribed, Drink, and away;
but how delicious is that hasty draught, and how long and brightly the thought of its transient refreshment dwells in the memory. [ Tuckerman ]
People seldom read a book which is given to them; and few are given. The way to spread a work is to sell it at a low price. No man will send to buy a thing that costs even sixpence without an intention to read it. [ Johnson ]
The mind should be accustomed to make wise reflections, and draw curious conclusions as it goes along; the habitude of which made Pliny the Younger affirm that he never read a book so bad but he drew some profit from it [ Sterne ]
Much depends upon when and where you read a book. In the five or six impatient minutes before the dinner is quite ready, who would think of taking up the Faerie Queen for a stopgap, or a volume of Bishop Andrews's Sermons? [ Lamb ]
Some read books only with a view to find fault, while others read only, to be taught; the former are like venomous spiders, extracting a poisonous quality, where the latter, like the bees, sip out a sweet and profitable juice. [ L'Estrange ]
Some new books it is necessary to read, - part for the information they contain, and others in order to acquaint one's self with the state of literature in the age in which one lives: but I would rather read too few than too many. [ Lord Dudley ]
I read hard, or not at all; never skimming, never turning aside to merely inviting books; and Plato, Aristotle, Butler, Thucydides, Sterne, Jonathan Edwards, have passed like the iron atoms of the blood into my mental constitution. [ F. W. Robertson ]
When I take up a book I have read before, I know what to expect; the satisfaction is not lessened by being anticipated. I shake hands with, and look our old tried and valued friend in the face, - compare notes and chat the hour away. [ Hazlitt ]
Try for yourselves what you can read in half-an-hour, ... and consider what treasures you might have laid by at the end of the year; and what happiness, fortitude and wisdom they would have given you during all the days of your life. [ John Morley ]
It is not the reading of many books which is necessary to make a man wise or good, but the well-reading of a few, could he be sure to have the best. And it is not possible to read over many on the same subject without a great deal of loss of precious time. [ Richard Baxter ]
Some will read only old books, as if there were no valuable truths to be discovered in modern publications: others will only read new books, as if some valuable truths are not among the old. Some will not read a book because they know the author: others would also read the man. [ Disraeli ]
Of all studies, the most delightful and the most useful is biography. The seeds of great events lie near the surface; historians delve too deep for them. No history was ever true. Lives I have read which, if they were not, had the appearance, the interest, and the utility of truth. [ Landor ]
Oratory is the huffing and blustering spoiled child of a semi-barbarous age. The press is the foe of rhetoric, but the friend of reason; and the art of declamation has been sinking in value from the moment that speakers were foolish enough to publish, and readers wise enough to read. [ Colton ]
The silent power of books is a great power in the world; and there is a joy in reading them which those alone can know who read them with desire and enthusiasm. Silent, passive, and noiseless though they be, they may yet set in action countless multitudes, and change the order of nations. [ Henry Giles ]
The education which has, however, made me a writer has been a living one. I have not only read much, I have seen much, and enjoyed much, and, above all, I have sorrowed much. God has put into my hands every cup of life, sweet and bitter, and the bitter has often become sweet, and the sweet bitter. [ Amelia E. Barr, The Art of Authorship, 1891 ]
Extemporaneous and oral harangues will always have this advantage over those that are read from a manuscript: every burst of eloquence or spark of genius they may contain, however studied they may have been beforehand, will appear to the audience to be the effect of the sudden inspiration of talent. [ Colton ]
Learn to be good readers, which is perhaps a more difficult thing than you imagine. Learn to be discriminative In your reading; to read faithfully and with your best attention, all kinds of things which you have a real interest in, - a real, not an imaginary - and which you find to be really fit for what you are engaged in. [ Carlyle ]
The works of nature and the works of revelation display religion to mankind in characters so large and visible that those who are not quite blind may in them see and read the first principles and most necessary parts of it, and from thence penetrate into those infinite depths filled with the treasures of wisdom and knowledge. [ Locke ]
This, therefore, is a law not found in books, but written on the fleshly tablets of the heart, which we have not learned from man, received or read, but which we have caught up from Nature herself, sucked in and imbibed; the knowledge of which we were not taught, but for which we were made; we received it not by education, but by intuition. [ Cicero ]
They that have read about everything are thought to understand everything too; but it is not always so. Reading furnishes the mind only with the materials of knowledge; it is thinking that makes what we read ours. We are of the ruminating kind, and it is not enough to cram ourselves with a great load of collections, - we must I chew them over again. [ Channing ]
After having said, read, and written what we have of women, what is the fact? In good faith, it is this: they are handsomer, more amiable, more essential, more worthy, and have more sensibility than we. All the faults that we reproach in them do not cause as much evil as one of ours. And, then, are their faults not due to our despotism, injustice, and self-love? [ Prince de Ligne ]
When the great Kepler had at length discovered the harmonic laws that regulate the motions of the heavenly bodies, he exclaimed: Whether my discoveries will be read by posterity or by my contemporaries is a matter that concerns them more than me. I may well be contented to wait one century for a reader, when God Himself, during so many thousand years, has waited for an observer like myself.
[ Macaulay ]
Mr. Johnson had never, by his own account, been a close student, and used to advise young people never to be without a book in their pocket, to be read at bye-times, when they had nothing else to do. It has been by that means,
said he to a boy at our house one day, that all my knowledge has been gained, except what I have picked up by running about the world with my wits ready to observe, and my tongue ready to talk.
[ Mrs. Piozzi ]
The habit of committing our thoughts to writing is a powerful means of expanding the mind, and producing a logical and systematic arrangement of our views and opinions. It is this which gives the writer a vast superiority, as to the accuracy and extent of his conceptions, over the mere talker. No one can ever hope to know the principles of any art or science thoroughly who does not write as well as read upon the subject. [ Blakey ]
Your invitation honors me, and pleases me because you still keep me in your remembrance, but I am seventy; seventy, and would nestle in the chimney-corner, and smoke my pipe, and read my book, and take my rest, wishing you well in all affection; and that when you in your return shall arrive at pier No. 70 you may step aboard your waiting ship with a reconciled spirit, and lay your course toward the sinking sun with a contented heart. [ Mark Twain, Seventieth Birthday speech ]
Have you ever rightly considered what the mere ability to read means? That it is the key which admits us to the whole world of thought and fancy and imagination? to the company of saint and sage, of the wisest and the wittiest at their wisest and wittiest moment? That it enables us to see with the keenest eyes, hear with the finest ears, and listen to the sweetest voices of all time? More than that, it annihilates time and space for us. [ Lowell ]
There are many persons of combative tendencies, who read for ammunition, and dig out of the Bible iron for balls. They read, and they find nitre and charcoal and sulphur for powder. They read, and they find cannon. They read, and they make portholes and embrasures. And if a man does not believe as they do, they look upon him as an enemy, and let fly the Bible at him to demolish him. So men turn the word of God into a vast arsenal, filled with all manner of weapons, offensive and defensive. [ H. W. Beecher ]
The drama is not a mere copy of nature, not a facsimile. It is the free running hand of genius, under the impression of its liveliest wit or most passionate impulses, a thousand times adorning or feeling all as it goes; and you must read it, as the healthy instinct of audiences almost always does, if the critics will let them alone, with a grain of allowance, and a tendency to go away with as much of it for use as is necessary, and the rest for the luxury of laughter, pity, or poetical admiration. [ Leigh Hunt ]
Gentlemen, do you know what is the finest speech that I ever in my life heard or read? It is the address of Garibaldi to his Roman soldiers, when he told them: Soldiers, what I have to offer you is fatigue, danger, struggle and death; the chill of the cold night in the free air, and heat under the burning sun; no lodgings, no munitions, no provisions, but forced marches, dangerous watchposts and the continual struggle with the bayonet against batteries; - those who love freedom and their country may follow me.
That is the most glorious speech I ever heard in my life. [ Kossuth ]
When I look upon the tombs of the great, every motion of envy dies; when I read the epitaphs of the beautiful, every inordinate desire forsake me: when I meet with the grief of parents upon a tombstone, my heart melts with compassion; when I see the tombs of the parents themselves, I reflect how vain it is to grieve for those whom we must quickly follow; when I see kings lying beside those who deposed them, when I behold rival wits placed side by side, or the holy men who divided the world with their contests and disputes, I reflect with sorrow and astonishment on the frivolous competitions, factions, and debates of mankind. [ Addison ]