Read, every day, something no one else is reading. Think, every day, something no one else is thinking. Do, every day, something no one else would be silly enough to do. It is bad for the mind to be always part of unanimity.

 —Christopher Morley

The habit of reading is the only enjoyment in which there is no alloy; it lasts when all other pleasures fade.

—Anthony Trollope

Each time we re-read a book we get more out of it because we put more into it; a different person is reading it, and therefore it is a different book.

—Murial Clark

Do your bit to save humanity from lapsing back into barbarity by reading all the novels you can.

—Richard Hughes

After three days without reading, talk becomes flavorless.

—Chinese proverb

In the case of good books, the point is not to see how many of them you can get through, but rather how many can get through to you.

 —Mortimer Adler

What one reads becomes part of what one sees and feels.

 —Ralph Ellison

Beware the man of one book.

—Saint Thomas Aquinas

Words — so innocent and powerless as they are, as standing in a dictionary, how potent for good and evil they become in the hands of one who knows how to combine them.

—Nathaniel Hawthorne

The books we need are the kind that act upon us like a misfortune, that make us suffer like the death of someone we love more than ourselves, that make us feel as though we were on the verge of suicide, or lost in a forest remote from all human habitation — a book should serve as the ax for the frozen sea within us.

 —Franz Kafka

Words are, of course, the most powerful drug used by mankind.

 —Rudyard Kipling

The many great gardens of the world, of literature and poetry, of painting and music, of religion and architecture, all make the point as clear as possible: The soul cannot thrive in the absence of a garden. If you don’t want paradise, you are not human; and if you are not human, you don’t have a soul.

 —Thomas Moore

Books are the carriers of civilization. Without books, history is silent, literature dumb, science crippled, thought and speculation at a standstill.

—Barbara W. Tuchman

A good book has no ending.

 —R.D. Cumming