Laurence Sterne Quotes

The only thing worse than not reading a book in the last ninety days is not reading a book in the last ninety days and thinking that it doesn't matter

The ability to read awoke inside of me some long dormant craving to be mentally alive.

If this nation is to be wise as well as strong, if we are to achieve our destiny, then we need more new ideas for more wise men reading more good books in more public libraries.

The truth of things is the chief nutriment of superior intellects.

I am probably a pseudo-intellectual.

I read books like mad, but I am careful to to let anything I read influence me.

I think it's good to stimulate your mind.

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

I tend to read a lot of books and believe in a certain ideology.

He has left off reading altogether, to the great improvement of his originality.

I think I write in order to discover on my shelf a new book that I would enjoy reading, or to see a new play that would engross me.

When we learn to read, it's a real product of civilization and a civilized society. It affects your brain. It affects the way you think, and it gives you that capacity for self-reflection that you simply do not have without the agency of books.

A person who does not read cannot think. He may have good mental processes, but he has nothing to think about. You can feel for people or natural phenomena and react to them, but they are not ideas. You cannot think about them.

People really need to take time and read a book. You know? That’s my advice. You could read A New Slant on Life, you could read Dianetics. And I think if you really read it, you’ll understand it, but unless you do, you’ll speculate. And I think that’s a mistake to do that.

For any kind of reading I think better than leaving a blank still a blank, because the mind must receive a degree of enlargement and obtain a little strength by a slight exertion of its thinking powers; besides, even the productions that are only addressed to the imagination, raise the reader a little above the gross gratification of appetites, to which the mind has not given a shade of delicacy.

We find little in a book but what we put there. But in great books, the mind finds room to put many things.

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

The second suggestion is to think as well as to read. I know people who read and read, and for all the good it does them they might just as well cut bread-and-butter. They take to reading as better men take to drink. They fly through the shires of literature on a motor-car, their sole object being motion. They will tell you how many books they have read in a year. Unless you give at least 45 minutes to careful, fatiguing reflection (it is an awful bore at first) upon what you are reading, your 90 minutes of a night are chiefly wasted.

Many adults, whether consciously or unconsciously, find it beneath their adult dignity to do anything as childish as read a book, think a thought, or get an idea. Adults are rarely embarrased at having forgotten what little algebra or geography they once learned

Few people ask from books what books can give us. Most commonly we come to books with blurred and divided minds, asking of fiction that it shall be true, of poetry that it shall be false, of biography that it shall be flattering, of history that it shall enforce our own prejudices. If we could banish all such preconceptions when we read, that would be an admirable beginning.

I had begun to read books and things and, in fact, one of the persons who started me thinking seriously was an atheist that I, another negro inmate whom I'd heard in a discussion with white inmates and who was able to hold his own at all levels. And he impressed me with his knowledge, and I began to listen very carefully to some of the things he said.

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

If we encounter a man of rare intellect, we should ask him what books he reads.

He that never thinks can never be wise.

Some read to think, these are rare; some to write, these are common; and some read to talk, and these form the great majority.