Samuel Taylor Coleridge Quotes

Certainly, we do not need to be soothed and entertained always like children. He who resorts to the easy novel, because he is languid, does no better than if he took a nap.

Many books require no thought from those who read them, and for a very simple reason; they made no such demand upon those who wrote them.

Any man who reads too much and uses his own brain too little falls into lazy habits of thinking.

There's a richness that reading gives you, an opportunity to probe more than any other medium I know of. Reading is about not being content with the surface.

Thinking is the hardest work we can do, and among the most important

Reading is a mere makeshift for original thinking.

A book is less important for what it says than for what it makes you think.

In fact, I think more broadly about what an audience requires, but I want an audience to be fascinated by the process of finding an answer, or finding out there isn't one.

I like to make people think.

Brains are no good if you don't use them.

... we must read, not only for what we read but for what it makes us think.

Books are to be called for and supplied on the assumption that the process of reading is not a half-sleep, but in the highest sense an exercise, a gymnastic struggle; that the reader is to do something for himself.

Reading is the work of the alert mind, is demanding, and under ideal conditions produces finally a sort of ecstasy.

i dunno," i said, "but i have an idea that people who don't think too much tend to look younger longer

After all, what is reading but a vice, like drink or venery or any other form of excessive self-indulgence? One reads to tickle and amuse one's mind; one reads, above all, to prevent oneself thinking.

Strain your brain more than your eye.

One reader is better than another in proportion as he is able of a greater range of activity in reading and exerts more effort.

Satisfied if they themselves can escape from the hard labour of thought, they willingly abandon to others the guardianship of their thoughts.

Reading is pleasure and happiness to be alive or sadness to be alive and above all it's knowledge and questions.

Reading is merely a surrogate for thinking for yourself; it means letting someone else direct your thoughts. Many books, moreover, serve merely to show how many ways there are of being wrong, and how far astray you yourself would go if you followed their guidance. You should read only when your own thoughts dry up, which will of course happen frequently enough even to the best heads; but to banish your own thoughts so as to take up a book is a sin against the holy ghost; it is like deserting untrammeled nature to look at a herbarium or engravings of landscapes.

Those who cannot think, have, in my opinion, a necessity (which goes very far towards creating a right) for amusement.

When you read, you think, and when you smoke, you think. It's a pleasurable thing, and not a duty.

The gift of literature is that, in some lucky cases, reading a novel or a story makes the reader more curious, more open-minded.

Reading is a dissuasion from immorality. Reading stands in the place of company.

Reading gives one something to think about other than one's self.