But truths on which depends our main concern,
That 'tis our shame and misery not to learn,
Shine by the side of every path we tread
With such a lustre he that runs may read.
The delight of opening a new pursuit, or a new course of reading, imparts the vivacity and novelty of youth even to old age.
I like to be beholden to the great metropolitan English speech, the sea which receives tributaries from every region under heaven. I should as soon think of swimming across the Charles river when I wish to go to Boston, as of reading all my books in originals, when I have them rendered for me in my mother tongue.
If we encountered a man of rare intellect, we should ask him what books he read.
Our high respect for a well-read man is praise enough of literature.
My early and invincible love of reading,
* * * I would not exchange for the treasures of India.
The sagacious reader who is capable of reading between these lines what does not stand written in them, but is nevertheless implied, will be able to form some conception.
Zwar sind sie an das Beste nicht gewōhnt,
Allein sie haben schrecklich viel gelesen.
What they're accustomed to is no great matter,
But then, alas! they've read an awful deal.
In a polite age almost every person becomes a reader, and receives more instruction from the Press than the Pulpit.
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.
Write the vision, and make it plain upon tables, that he may run that readeth it.
Ut percurrat qui legerit eum.
That he that readeth it may run over it.
Rendering in the Vulgate.
Books have always a secret influence on the understanding; we cannot at pleasure obliterate ideas: he that reads books of science, though without any desire fixed of improvement, will grow more knowing; he that entertains himself with moral or religious treatises, will imperceptibly advance in goodness; the ideas which are often offered to the mind, will at last find a lucky moment when it is disposed to receive them.
A man ought to read just as inclination leads him; for what he reads as a task will do him little good.
What is twice read is commonly better remembered than what is transcribed.
It may be well to wait a century for a reader, as God has waited six thousand years for an observer.
I love to lose myself in other men's minds.
When I am not walking, I am reading;
I cannot sit and think. Books think for me.
Night after night,
He sat and bleared his eyes with books.
Many readers judge of the power of a book by the shock it gives their feelings.
Seria cum possim, quod delectantia malim
Scribere, tu causa es lector.
Thou art the cause, O reader, of my dwelling on lighter topics, when I would rather handle serious ones.
His classical reading is great: he can quote
Horace, Juvenal, Ovid and Martial by rote.
He has read Metaphysics * * * Spinoza and Kant
And Theology too: I have heard him descant
Upon Basil and Jerome. Antiquities, art,
He is fond of. He knows the old masters by heart,
And his taste is refined.
Who reads
Incessantly, and to his reading brings not
A spirit and judgment equal or superior,
(And what he brings what need he elsewhere seek?)
Uncertain and unsettled still remains,
Deep versed in books and shallow in himself,
Crude or intoxicate, collecting toys
And trifles for choice matters, worth a sponge.
As children gathering pebbles on the shore.
