The reading of all good books is like a conversation with the finest minds of past centuries.

René Descartes

The difference between literature and journalism is that journalism is unreadable and literature is not read.

Oscar Wilde

Reading maketh a full man, conference a ready man, and writing an exact man.

Francis Bacon

A great value of antiquity lies in the fact that its writings are the only ones that modern men still read with exactness.

Friedrich Nietzsche

I do not take a single newspaper, nor read one a month, and I feel myself infinitely the happier for it.

Thomas Jefferson

A classic is something that everybody wants to have read and nobody wants to read.

Mark Twain

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.

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

We have a criminal jury system which is superior to any in the world and its efficiency is only marred by the difficulty of finding twelve men every day who don't know anything and can't read.

Mark Twain

Age appears to be best in four things; old wood best to burn, old wine to drink, old friends to trust, and old authors to read.

Francis Bacon

Each has his past shut in him like the leaves of a book known to him by his heart, and his friends can only read the title.

Virginia Woolf

I never saw, heard, nor read, that the clergy were beloved in any nation where Christianity was the religion of the country. Nothing can render them popular, but some degree of persecution.

Jonathan Swift

A person who won't read has no advantage over one who can't read.

Mark Twain

A man ought to read just as inclination leads him for what he reads as a task will do him little good.

Samuel Johnson

Nature's landscapes are like pages of a living book, inviting us to read and explore its stories.

My early and invincible love of reading I would not exchange for all the riches of India.

Edward Gibbon

Leave all the afternoon for exercise and recreation, which are as necessary as reading. I will rather say more necessary because health is worth more than learning.

Thomas Jefferson

I've never known any trouble than an hour's reading didn't assuage.

Arthur Schopenhauer

The things I want to know are in books; my best friend is the man who'll get me a book I ain't read.

Abraham Lincoln

There is an art of reading, as well as an art of thinking, and an art of writing.

Benjamin Disraeli

Education begins the gentleman, but reading, good company and reflection must finish him.

John Locke

I never desire to converse with a man who has written more than he has read.

Samuel Johnson

There is a great deal to be said in favor of reading a novel backwards.

Oscar Wilde

The world is a beautiful book, but of little use to him who cannot read it.

Carlo Goldoni

Reading furnishes the mind only with materials of knowledge; it is thinking that makes what we read ours.

John Locke

If I read a book and it makes my whole body so cold no fire can ever warm me, I know that is poetry.

Emily Dickinson