Focused Reading Quotes

The Roman philosopher Seneca the Younger (tutor to Nero) complained that his peers were wasting time and money accumulating too many books, admonishing that "the abundance of books is a distraction." Instead, Seneca recommended focusing on a limited number of good books, to be read thoroughly and repeatedly.

No book can be so good, as to be profitable when negligently read.

A large library is apt to distract rather than to instruct the learner; it is much better to be confined to a few authors than to wander at random over many.

Read much, but not many works.

Say I lived until 80 and read a book a month seriously, that means I was looking at 480 books left in my life. If I had only 480 left, I wanted to stop sifting through material I didn't have confidence in and turn my attention to those that I know merited my reading.

I read a lot, but I read about the areas that I'm interested in.

If we consider men and women generally, and apart from their professions or occupations, there is only one situation I can think of in which they almost pull themselves up by their bootstraps, making an effort to read better than they usually do. When they are in love and are reading a love letter, they read for all they are worth.

When I read, I'm purely a reader.

Reading without purpose is sauntering not exercise.

Aquinas was once asked, with what compendium a man might become learned? He answered "By reading of one book.

I only read the left-hand pages, so I finish books twice as fast.

[Lincoln in the Bardo] is not a long book. And that meant I could obsess over it and live in it both backwards and forwards and hyper-control everything.

To read well, that is, to read true books in a true spirit, is a noble exercise, and one that will tax the reader more than any exercise which the customs of the day esteem. It requires a training such as the athletes underwent, the steady intention almost of the whole life to this object. Books must be read as deliberately and reservedly as they were written.

I like a book. I like to read for four hours at a stretch. I think very few are the young people who are even capable of reading for four hours at a stretch, because it's such a bizarre thing for them to do. I am mourning this.

One doesn't read poetry while thinking of other things.

When you read the Bible, read for quality not quantity.

If the book is good, is about something that you know, and is truly written, and reading it over you see that this is so, you can let the boys yip and the noise will have that pleasant sound coyotes make on a very cold night when they are out in the snow and you are in your own cabin that you have built or paid for with your work.

I read hard, or not at all; never skimming, never turning aside to merely inciting books; and Plato, Aristotle, Butler, Thucydides, Sterne, Jonathan Edwards, have passed like the iron atoms of the blood into my mental constitution.

Master those books you have. Read them thoroughly. Bathe in them until they saturate you. Read and re-read them...digest them...a student will find that his mental constitution is more affected by one book thoroughly mastered than by 20 books he has merely skimmed.

I am a serious reader, and I read slowly.

More is got from one book on which the thought settles for a definite end in knowledge, than from libraries skimmed over by a wandering eye.

Whatever we read from intense curiosity gives us the model of how we should always read. Plodding along page after page with an equal attention to each word results in attention to mere words.

There is absolutely no such thing as reading but by a candle. We have tried the affectation of a book at noon-day in gardens, and in sultry arbours, but it was labor thrown away. Those gay motes in the beam come about you, hovering and teasing, like so many coquets, that will have you all to their self, and are jealous of your abstractions. By the midnight taper, the writers digests his meditations. By the same light we must approach to their perusal, if we would catch the flame, the odour.

He objected, though, to indiscriminate reading. 'One must have some question,' he wrote, 'addressed to the book one is going to read.

I’m reading! I don’t want to be disturbed!