Reading

Reading is my favorite hobby. I love reading; I am a bookworm. I�ve been reading regularly ever since I learned my ABCs. Reading comes closest to living lives I could never have lived otherwise, traveling to places I could never have visited otherwise, traveling to times I could not have gone otherwise, and thinking in ways I could never have thought otherwise. Reading has taught me so much.

I read a broad range of subjects, including military history, spirituality, biographies, autobiographies, memoirs, psychology, running, bodybuilding, paranormal and the supernatural, UFOs, addictions, physics, cosmology, writing, and true stories. I appreciate fiction, but I prefer non-fiction.

Some of my favorite quotes about reading, taken mainly from the book �Shelf Life�.

Quotes on Reading
Even if you have the Internet and we have the world wired, if you cannot read or write, you're left out. There is just no hope for you in the twenty-first century.
-- Rick Warren

For one who reads, there is no limit to the number of lives that may be lived, for fiction, biography, and history offer an inexhaustible number of lives in many parts of the world, in all periods of time.
-- Louis L'Amour (1908 - 1988)

The real purpose of books is to trap the mind into doing its own thinking.
-- Christopher Morley

A broad interest in books usually means a broad interest in life.
-- Lyman Abbott (1835-1922)

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 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?
-- James Russell Lowell

The man who does not read good books has no advantage over the man who can�t read
them.
-- Mark Twain (1835-1910)

This habit of reading, I make bold to tell you, is your pass to the greatest, the purest pleasure that God has prepared for His creatures. It lasts when all other pleasures fade. It will support you when all other recreations are gone. It will last until your death. It will make your hours pleasant to you as long as you live.�
-- Anthony Trollope (1815- 1882)

Books are the food of youth; the delight of old age; the ornament of prosperity; the refuge and comfort of adversity; a delight at home; no hindrance abroad; companions at night, in traveling, in the country. Indeed, no wise man ought ever be found apart their company.
-- Cicero (106 -43 B.C.)

I really believe you can�t build a self without books. You get an inner voice by listening to someone else�s words in your ear.
-- Jane Hamilton (1957-)

The end of reading is not more books but more life.
-- Holbrook Jackson (1874-1948)

The habit of reading is the only one I know in which there is no alloy. It lasts when all other pleasures fade. It will be there to support you when all other resources are gone. It will be present to you when the energies of your body have fallen away from you. It will make your hours pleasant to you as long as you live.
-- Anthony Trollope (1815 - 1882)

My early and invisible love of reading, I would not exchange for the treasures of India.
-- Edward Gibbon (1734-1794)

No matter what his rank or position may be, the lover of books is the richest and the happiest of the children of men.�
-- Alfred Johnson (1791-1877)

Of the making of books there is no end.
-- King Solomon

Most ignorance is vincible ignorance; we don�t know because we don�t want to know; we remain uninformed because we refuse to read.
-- Aldous Huxley (1894-1963)

So rich is the companionship of books, so profound is the enrichment of books, and so deep is the pleasure of books that none of the vast changes in cultures and civilizations since has stemmed their ever rising tide.
-- Tristan Gylberd (1954-)

Books are the wise man�s passport to success and greatness. Books are the thresholds to wonder; the gateways to enlightenment; the foundations of virtue; and the pediment of honor.
-- Cicero (106-43 B.C.)

Reading feeds the brain. It is evident that most minds are starving to death.
-- Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790)

A well-read people are easy to lead, but difficult to drive; easy to govern, but difficult to enslave.�
-- Baron Henry Brougham (1778-1868)

Reading maketh a full man, conference a ready man, and writing an exact man.
-- Francis Bacon (1561-1626)

Of all the diversions of life, there is none so proper to fill up its empty spaces as the reading of useful and entertaining authors.
-- Joseph Addison (1672-1719)

Books have always a secret influence on the understanding; we cannot at pleasure obliterate ideas; he that reads books of science, though without any fixed desire of improvement, will grow more knowing; he that entertains himself with moral and 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 disposed to receive them.
-- Samuel Johnson (1709-1784)

Read at every wait; read at all hours; read within leisure; read about in times of labor; read as one goes in; read as one goes out. The task of the educated mind is simply put; read to lead.
-- Cicero (106-43 B.C.)

Every man who knows how to read has it in his power to magnify himself, to multiply the ways in which he exists, to make his life full, significant, and interesting.
-- Aldous Huxley (1894-1963)

Reading is to the mind what exercise is to the body.
-- Richard Steele (1672-1729)

If a book is worth reading, it is worth buying.
-- John Ruskin (1819-1900)

When I get a little money, I buy books; and if there is any left, I buy food and clothes.
-- Desiderious Erasmus (1466-1536)

I have always imagined that Paradise will be a kind of library.
-- Jorge Luis Borges (1899-1986)

Who kills a man kills a reasonable creature, God�s images; but he who destroys a good book, kills reason itself, kills the image of God, as it were in the eye. Many a man lives a burden to the earth; but a good book is the precious life-blood of a master spirit, embalmed and treasured up on purpose to a life beyond life.
-- John Milton (1608-1674)

My education was the library I had to read indiscriminately and all the time, with my eyes hanging out.
-- Dylan Thomas (1914-1953)

If fortune turns her face once more in kindness upon me before I go, I may chance, some quiet day, to lay my over-beating temples on a book, and so have the death I most envy.
-- Leigh Hunt (1784-1859)

It is from books that wise men derive consolation in the troubles of life.
-- Victor Hugo (1802-1885)

The very existence of libraries affords the best evidence that we may yet have hope for the future of man.
-- T.S. Eliot (1888-1965)

No place affords a more striking conviction of the vanity of human hopes than a public library.
-- Samuel Johnson (1709-1784)

A library is a token of, nay, a trophy of grace.
-- Martin Luther (1483-1546)

A busy man's life is generally one prolonged effort to avoid reading in order to prevent thinking. The accumulated stuff of his life distracts him from anything worthwhile. The thoughtful reader, on the other hand, surrounds himself with inducements to substance.
-- Aldous Huxley (1894-1963)

The way a book is read - which is to say, the qualities a reader brings to a book - can have as much to do with its worth as anything the author puts into it. Anyone who can read can learn how to read deeply and thus live more fully.
-- Martin Galbreth (1922-1998)

I own that I am disposed to say grace upon twenty other occasions in the course of the day besides my dinner; why have we none for book?
-- Charles Lamb (1775-1834)

The reading of all good books is like a conversation with the finest men of past centuries.
-- Rene Descartes (1596-1650)

A good writer is basically a story-teller, not a scholar or a redeemer of mankind.
-- Isaac Basbevis Singer (1904-1991)

The reason why so few good books are written is that so few people who can write know anything.
-- Walter Bagebot (1826-1877)

A man's needs are few. The simpler the life, therefore, the better. Indeed, only three things are truly necessary in order to make life happy: the blessing of God, the benefit of books, and the benevolence of friends.
-- Thomas Chalmers (1780-1847)

Make a list of books to be read and you have set the course of a life well-spent.
-- Francis Bacon (1561-1626)

Pity the poor soul who finds entertainment in the buzzing distractions of this world, who finds amusement in the abandonment of the catalog of the canon of great books. His tiny world, his restricted scope, his narrow experience has robbed him of the fullness of life.
-- Gustave Flaubert (1821-1880)

Beware of popularity. Everybody's favorite book is nobody's.
-- Arthur Schopenbauer (1788-1860)

There are a not few sadly mistaken moderns who actually believe that because a book is hard to read, it is hardly worth the effort. They have been robbed of their own indolence. Thus, the great lists of classics, the must-read catalogs, and the canons of the masterworks are closed universes to them. They have censored themselves. They have submitted to an intellectual aparthied of their own making. They have shackled themselves to the shallow, the petty, and the immediately accessible. They are to be pitied, above all else.
-- Tristan Gylberd (1954-)

It is pretty clear that the majority, if they spoke without passion and were fully articulate, would not accuse us of liking the wrong books, but of making such a fuss about any books at all. We treat as a main ingrediant in our well-being something which to them is marginal. Hence to say simply that they like one thing and we another is to leave out nearly the whole of the facts.
-- C.S. Lewis (1898-1963)

If my life had been more full of calamity than it has been, I would live it all over again to have read the books I did in my youth. I have made a list of them, and it has made me wishful.
-- William Hazlitt (1778-1830)

Never underestimate the power of books for children. Note this well: it was the literature we read before we attained sophistication, maturity, and adulthood that has done the most to mold our characters, frame our thoughts, and influence our lives. A catalog of such books might well afford us a better map of comprehension than all the machinations of psychology.
-- Richard Ogilvie (1902-1988)

All books are divisible into two classes, the books of the hour, and the books of all time. Mark this distinction - it is not one of quality only. It is not merely the bad book that does not last, and the good ones that does. It is a distinction of species. There are good bookss for the hour, and good books for all time; bad books for the hour, and bad ones for all time.
-- John Ruskin (1819-1900)

The best effect of any book is that it excited the reader to self activity.
-- Thomas Carlye (1795-1881)

Literary experience heals the wound, without undermining the privlege, of individuality. Here, as in worship, in love, in moral action, and in knowing, I transcend myself; and am never more myself than when I do.
-- C.S. Lewis (1898-1963)

What I like in a good author is not what he says, but what he whispers.
-- Logan Pearsall Smith (1865-1946)

Desire of knowledge, like the thirst of riches, increases ever with the acquisition of it. Reading - reading substantively, artfully, and thoughtfully - only aggravates the effect.
-- Laurence Sterne (1713-1768)

If one author steals from another, it's plagiarism; but if he steals from many, it's research.
-- Wilson Mizner (1876-1933)

The chief glory of every people arises from its authors.
-- Samuel Johnson (1709-1784)

Never read a book through merely because you have begun it
-- John Witherspoon (1723-1794)

Reading is to the mind what exercise is to the body. As by the one, health is preserved, strenthened, and invigorated; by the other, virtue - which is the health of the mind - is kept alive, cherished, and confirmed.
-- Joseph Addison (1672-1719)

Books on Reading

- Shelf Life by George and Karen Grant
- So Many Books So Little Time by Sara Nelson
- The Joy of Books by Eric Burns
- Honey for a Woman's Heart by Gladys Hunt
- Honey for a Child's Heart by Gladys Hunt
- Honey for a Teen's Heart by Gladys Hunt

I'll be so happy if you could sign my guestbook.Thank you very much.

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