Quotes about read
page 47

Camille Paglia photo
Camille Paglia photo

“When in doubt, I read Oscar Wilde.”

Camille Paglia (1947) American writer

Source: Sex, Art and American Culture : New Essays (1992), p. xi

Aldo Leopold photo
Miyamoto Musashi photo
Prem Rawat photo

“I wonder how it will read five hundred years from now?”

Morris West (1916–1999) Australian writer

To make a man confess a loving God you burn him!
The Heretic (1968)

Ernest Hemingway photo
Jane Austen photo
Jane Austen photo
George Gordon Byron photo

“Send me no more reviews of any kind. — I will read no more of evil or good in that line.”

George Gordon Byron (1788–1824) English poet and a leading figure in the Romantic movement

Walter Scott has not read a review of himself for thirteen years.
Letter to his publisher, John Murray (3 November 1821).

Walt Whitman photo
John Stuart Mill photo
Ethan Allen photo
Robert Greene photo
Will Durant photo
Arthur C. Clarke photo

“I am afraid that this chapter will amply demonstrate the truth of Clarke's 69th Law, viz., "Reading computer manuals without the hardware is as frustrating as reading sex manuals without the software."”

Arthur C. Clarke (1917–2008) British science fiction writer, science writer, inventor, undersea explorer, and television series host

In both cases the cure is simple though usually very expensive.
"Appendix II: MITE for Morons," The Odyssey File (1984), p. 123
1960s, Clarke's Three Laws, et al (1962; 1973…)

Richard Dawkins photo

“I agree that it's very difficult to come to an absolute definition of what's moral and what is not. We are on our own, without a god, and we have to get together, sit down together and decide what kind of society do we want to live in. Do we want to live in a society where people steal, where people kill, where people don't pull their weight paying their taxes, doing that kind of thing? Do we want to live in a kind of society where everybody is out for themselves in a dog-eat-dog world? And we decide in conclave together that that's not the kind of world in which we want to live. It's difficult. There is no absolute reason why we should believe that that's true - it's a moral decision which we take as individuals - and we take it collectively as a collection of individuals. If you want to get that sort of value system from religion I want you to ask yourself - whereabouts in religion do you get it? Which religion do you get it from? They're all different. If you get it from the Judeo-Christian-Islamic tradition then I beg you - don't get it from your holy book! Because the morality you will get from reading your holy book is hideous. Don't get it from your holy book. Don't get it from sucking up to your god. Don't get it from saying “oh, I'm terrified of going to hell so I'd better be good””

Richard Dawkins (1941) English ethologist, evolutionary biologist and author

that's a very ignoble reason to be good. Instead - be good for good reasons. Be good for the reason that's you've decided together with other people the society we want to live in: a decent humane society. Not one based on absolutism, not one based on holy books and not one based on sucking up to.. looking over your shoulder to the divine spy camera in the sky. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=roFdPHdhgKQ&t=59m29s
Richard Dawkins vs. Jonathan Sacks - BBC's RE:Think Festival (2012)

Thomas Carlyle photo

“The Church, poor old benighted creature, had at least taken care of that: the noble aspiring soul, not doomed to choke ignobly in its penuries, could at least run into the neighboring Convent, and there take refuge. Education awaited it there; strict training not only to whatever useful knowledge could be had from writing and reading, but to obedience, to pious reverence, self-restraint, annihilation of self,—really to human nobleness in many most essential respects. No questions asked about your birth, genealogy, quantity of money-capital or the like; the one question was, "Is there some human nobleness in you, or is there not?"”

Thomas Carlyle (1795–1881) Scottish philosopher, satirical writer, essayist, historian and teacher

The poor neat-herd's son, if he were a Noble of Nature, might rise to Priesthood, to High-priesthood, to the top of this world,—and best of all, he had still high Heaven lying high enough above him, to keep his head steady, on whatever height or in whatever depth his way might lie!
1850s, Latter-Day Pamphlets (1850), The New Downing Street (April 15, 1850)

Jane Austen photo
E.M. Forster photo

“Always fatuity, vulgarity, as soon as human passion is touched. […] Just as some poetry is of the eye (form, colour) and some of the ear, so Keats is of the palate. Not only has he constant reference to its pleasures, but the general sensation after reading him is one of tasting. 'What's the harm?”

E.M. Forster (1879–1970) English novelist

Well, taste for some reason or the other can't carry one far into the world of beauty—that reason being perhaps that though you don't want comradership there you do want the possibility of comradership, and A cannot swallow B's mouthful by any possibility:....and this exclusiveness (to maunder on) also attaches to the physical side of sex though not the least to the spiritual.
Letter 162, to Malcolm Darling, 1 December 1916
Selected Letters (1983-1985)

Thurgood Marshall photo
Paul A. Samuelson photo
Tracey Thorn photo
James Baldwin photo
Johannes Kepler photo

“Now because 18 months ago the first dawn, 3 months ago broad daylight but a very few days ago the full sun of the most highly remarkable spectacle has risen — nothing holds me back. I can give myself up to the sacred frenzy, I can have the insolence to make a full confession to mortal men that I have stolen the golden vessel of the Egyptians to make from them a tabernacle for my God far from the confines of the land of Egypt. If you forgive me I shall rejoice; if you are angry, I shall bear it; I am indeed casting the die and writing the book, either for my contemporaries or for posterity to read, it matters not which: let the book await its reader for a hundred years; God himself has waited six thousand years for his work to be seen.”

Book V, Introduction
Variant translation: It may well wait a century for a reader, as God has waited six thousand years for an observer.
As quoted in The Martyrs of Science; or, the Lives of Galileo, Tycho Brahe, and Kepler (1841) by David Brewster, p. 197. This has sometimes been misquoted as "It may be well to wait a century for a reader, as God has waited six thousand years for an observer."
Variant translation: I feel carried away and possessed by an unutterable rapture over the divine spectacle of heavenly harmony... I write a book for the present time, or for posterity. It is all the same to me. It may wait a hundred years for its readers, as God has also waited six thousand years for an onlooker.
As quoted in Calculus. Multivariable (2006) by Steven G. Krantz and Brian E. Blank. p. 126
Mysterium Cosmographicum (1596), Harmonices Mundi (1618)

Chris Matthews photo

“I'm reading last night about the fall of France in the summer of 1940, and the general calls up Churchill and says, 'It's over,' and Churchill says, 'How can it be? You got the greatest army in Europe. How can it be over?'”

Chris Matthews (1945) American news anchor

He said, 'It's over.'
comparing Bernie Sanders winning the Nevada caucus to the Nazi invasion of France
2020-02-24
Chris Matthews rebuked by MSNBC colleague for comparing Sanders win to Nazi invasion
Igor Derysh
Salon
https://www.salon.com/2020/02/24/chris-matthews-rebuked-by-msnbc-colleague-for-comparing-sanders-win-to-nazi-invasion/

Jason Reynolds photo
Nalo Hopkinson photo

“…There’s still this notion that you are somehow morally superior if you don’t know anything about the background of the writers you read, and I maintain that writers have every right to not talk their backgrounds, that’s fine, but when people do and it’s important to their work, to not know doesn’t mean you’re morally superior, it means you are indifferent…”

Nalo Hopkinson (1960) Jamaican Canadian writer

On the author having the right to reveal anything personal that’s significant to them in “Interview: Nalo Hopkinson” http://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/nonfiction/interview-nalo-hopkinson/ in Lightspeed (June 2013)

B.F. Skinner photo
Philip K. Dick photo
John Allen Paulos photo
John Allen Paulos photo
Céline Sciamma photo

“It’s a very bourgeois industry. There’s resistance to radicalism, and also less youth in charge. ‘A film can be feminist?’ They don’t know this concept. They don’t read the book. They don’t even know about the fact that ‘male gaze’ exists. You can tell it’s a country where there’s a lot of sexism, and a strong culture of patriarchy.”

Céline Sciamma (1978) French director and screenwriter

On the tepid reception of her film Portrait of a Lady on Fire in France in “Céline Sciamma: 'In France, they don’t find the film hot. They think it lacks flesh, it’s not erotic'” https://www.theguardian.com/film/2020/feb/21/celine-sciamma-portrait-of-a-lady-on-fire in The Guardian (2020 Feb 21)

Derrick Morgan (American football) photo

“[S]tart by reading Pareto; elites routinely do things that in retrospect look politically suicidal.”

Brian Reynolds Myers (1963) American professor of international studies

2010s, Portrait of the Ally as an Intermediary (March 2018)

Bangalore Nagarathnamma photo

“I cannot let this book go no matter how many times I read it...it is as adorable as Lord Krishna.”

Bangalore Nagarathnamma (1878–1952) Indian singer

Medium Article - A tale of two devadasis - 22 May 2019 https://medium.com/@theteluguarchive/a-tale-of-two-devadasis-603ee867a172 - Archive https://web.archive.org/web/20200415202020/https://medium.com/@theteluguarchive/a-tale-of-two-devadasis-603ee867a172
About Radhika Santawanam (Appeasing Radhika)

Alastair Reynolds photo
Halldór Laxness photo
E.M. Forster photo
E.M. Forster photo
Louis Brandeis photo
Amy Coney Barrett photo
Mel Gibson photo
Donald J. Trump photo

“I work from early in the morning until late at night, haven’t left the White House in many months (except to launch Hospital Ship Comfort) in order to take care of Trade Deals, Military Rebuilding etc., and then I read a phony story in the failing @nytimes about my work schedule and eating habits, written by a third rate reporter who knows nothing about me. I will often be in the Oval Office late into the night & read & see that I am angrily eating a hamberger & Diet Coke in my bedroom. People with me are always stunned. Anything to demean!”

Donald J. Trump (1946) 45th President of the United States of America

As quoted by * 2020-04-26

'Hambergers' and 'Noble prizes': Trump attacks press in furious Twitter rant riddled with spelling errors

Alex Woodward

Independent

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politics/donald-trump-latest-coronavirus-hamburger-nobel-prize-russia-a9485006.html
2020s, 2020, April

Colin Powell photo
George Adamski photo
Joseph Addison photo
Robert Graves photo

“Love, Fear and Hate and Childish Toys
Are here discreetly blent;
Admire, you ladies, read, you boys,
My Country Sentiment.”

Robert Graves (1895–1985) English poet and novelist

"A First Review"
Country Sentiment (1920)

Mariko Tamaki photo

“Books don’t have a nutritional value. Which is to say, we don’t just read "good" books because they’re good for us. We read to expand our horizons, to understand and connect with something outside ourselves, good and bad. We read to challenge ourselves…”

Mariko Tamaki (1975) Canadian writer and artist

On reading books that might be deemed inappropriate in “We Read To Challenge Ourselves: An Interview With Mariko Tamaki” https://comicsalliance.com/mariko-tamaki-pride-week-interview/ in Comics Alliance (2016 Jun 24)

Mara Balls photo
Kazuo Ishiguro photo

“I don't really like to work with literary allusions very much. I never want to be in a position where I'm saying, "You've got to read a lot of other stuff" or "You've got to have had a good education in literature to fully appreciate what I'm doing."”

Kazuo Ishiguro (1954) Japanese-born British author

... I actually dislike, more than many people, working through literary allusion. I just feel that there's something a bit snobbish or elitist about that. I don't like it as a reader, when I'm reading something. It's not just the elitism of it; it jolts me out of the mode in which I'm reading. I've immersed myself in the world and then when the light goes on I'm supposed to be making some kind of literary comparison to another text. I find I'm pulled out of my kind of fictional world, I'm asked to use my brain in a different kind of way. I don't like that.

Rukeyser, Rebecca. " Kazuo Ishiguro: Mythic Retreat https://www.guernicamag.com/mythic-retreat/" guernicamag.com interview. 1 May 2015.

Tomi Adeyemi photo

“…I had a lot of different reasons for writing the book but at its core was the desire to write for black teenage girls growing up reading books they were absent from. That was my experience as a child. Children of Blood and Bone is a chance to address that. To say you are seen.”

Tomi Adeyemi (1993) American author

On her primary motivation to write Children of Blood and Bone in “Tomi Adeyemi: ‘We need a black girl fantasy book every month’” https://www.theguardian.com/books/2018/mar/10/tomi-adeyemi-interview-children-of-blood-and-bone-sarah-hughes in The Guardian (2018 Mar 10)

Helena Roerich photo
Patañjali photo

“The Yoga of action, leading to union with the soul is fiery aspiration, spiritual reading and devotion to Ishvara.”

Patañjali (-200–-150 BC) ancient Indian scholar(s) of grammar and linguistics, of yoga, of medical treatises

Patanjali, in “The Little Red Book of Yoga Wisdom], p. 24.

William Faulkner photo
Alicia Witt photo

“It is not about your ability to read, it is about your ability to learn.”

Christian Canlubo (2002) Filipino Internet Entrepreneur

Source: Christian Canlubo https://en.everybodywiki.com/Christian_Canlubo| Christian Canlubo profile on EverybodyWiki

Christian Canlubo https://en.everybodywiki.com/Christian_Canlubo response to a one person question that says he doesn't learn even he reads a multiple pages of a book in an event in the Philippines.

Arun Shourie photo
Arun Shourie photo
Robert O'Hara photo

“I did, not only because of that, but also because there was no value placed on education in my family. My mother just assumed I was smart, and I had glasses so I was called “four eyes,” and I was always reading a book, and so the outsider feeling came from the fact that I really loved school…”

Robert O'Hara American playwright and theatre director

Source: On feeling like an outsider both at his school and in his home life in “Artist Interview with Robert O'Hara” https://www.playwrightshorizons.org/shows/trailers/artist-interview-robert-ohara/ in Playwrights Horizon

Ibn Hazm photo
Ibn Hazm photo
Frederick Douglass photo
Harry Gordon Selfridge photo
John Herschel photo
Dorothy Thompson photo
Aldous Huxley photo

“I'm interested in truth, I like science. But truth's a menace, science is a public danger. As dangerous as it's been beneficent. … It's curious … to read what people in the time of Our Ford used to write about scientific progress. They seemed to imagine that it could go on indefinitely, regardless of everything else. Knowledge was the highest good, truth the supreme value; all the rest was secondary and subordinate. True, ideas were beginning to change even then. Our Ford himself did a great deal to shift the emphasise from truth and beauty to comfort and happiness. Mass production demanded the shift. Universal happiness keeps the wheels steadily turning; truth and beauty can't. And, of course, whenever the masses seized political power, then it was happiness rather than truth and beauty that mattered. Still, in spite of everything, unrestricted scientific resarch was still permitted. People still went on talking about truth and beauty as though they were sovereign goods. Right up to the time of the Nine Years' War. That made them change their tune all right. What's the point of truth or beauty or knowledge when the anthrax bombs are popping all around you? That was when science first began to be controlled — after the Nine Years' War. People were ready to have even their appetites controlled then. Anything for a quiet life. We've gone on controlling ever since. It hasn't been very good for truth, of course. But it's been very good for happiness. One can't have something for nothing. Happiness has got to be paid for.”

Source: Brave New World (1932), Mustapha Mond, in Ch. 16

Annie Besant photo

“There is a Path which leads to that which is known as Initiation, and through Initiation to the Perfecting of Man; a Path which is recognized in all the great religions, and the chief features of which are described in similar terms in every one of the great faiths of the world. You may read of it in the Roman Catholic teachings as divided into three parts: (1) The Path of Purification or Purgation; (2) the Path of Illumination; and (3) the Path of Union with Divinity. You find it among the Mussulmans in the Sufi — the mystic — teachings of Islam, where it is known under the names of the Way, the Truth and the Life. You find it further eastward still in the great faith of Buddhism, divided into subdivisions, though these can be classified under the broader outline. It is similarly divided in Hinduism; for in both those great religions, in which the study of psychology, of the human mind and the human constitution, has played so great a part, you find a more definite subdivision. But really it matters not to which faith you turn; it matters not which particular set of names you choose as best attracting or expressing your own ideas; the Path is but one; its divisions are always the same; from time immemorial that Path has stretched from the life of the world to the life of the Divine.”

Annie Besant (1847–1933) British socialist, theosophist, women's rights activist, writer and orator

Source: Initiation, The Perfecting of Man (1923)

Diana Pavlac Glyer photo
Whoopi Goldberg photo
Hamid Karzai photo
Leo Tolstoy photo
Leopold II of Belgium photo
Gustave Flaubert photo

“Do not read as children do to enjoy themselves, or, as the ambitious do to educate themselves. No, read to live.”

Gustave Flaubert (1821–1880) French writer (1821–1880)

June 1857
Correspondence, Letters to Mademoiselle Leroyer de Chantepie

Robert G. Ingersoll photo

“Suppose then, that I do read this Bible honestly, fairly, and when I get through I am compelled to say, “The book is not true.””

Robert G. Ingersoll (1833–1899) Union United States Army officer

If this is the honest result, then you are compelled to say, either that God has made no revelation to me, or that the revelation that it is not true, is the revelation made to me, and by which I am bound. If the book and my brain are both the work of the same Infinite God, whose fault is it that the book and the brain do not agree? Either God should have written a book to fit my brain, or should have made my brain to fit his book.
Some Reasons Why (1881)

Penn Jillette photo

“Take some time and put the Bible on your summer reading list. Try and stick with it cover to cover.”

Penn Jillette (1955) American magician

Not because it teaches history; we've shown you it doesn't. Read it because you'll see for yourself what the Bible is all about. It sure isn't great literature. If it were published as fiction, no reviewer would give it a passing grade. There are some vivid scenes and some quotable phrases, but there's no plot, no structure, there's a tremendous amount of filler, and the characters are painfully one-dimensional. Whatever you do, don't read the Bible for a moral code: it advocates prejudice, cruelty, superstition, and murder. Read it because: we need more atheists — and nothin will get you there faster than readin' the damn Bible.
"The Bible: Fact or Fiction?" Penn & Teller: Bullshit!, season 2 episode 6 (6 May 2004)
2000s

Woodrow Wilson photo

“I not only use all the brains I have, but all I can borrow, and I have borrowed a lot since I read it to you first.”

Woodrow Wilson (1856–1924) American politician, 28th president of the United States (in office from 1913 to 1921)

Speech to the National Press Club http://books.google.com/books?id=8gLmAAAAMAAJ&pg=PA439 (20 March 1914)
1910s

Woodrow Wilson photo

“I have always detested Germany. I have never gone there. But I have read many German books on law. They are so far from our views that they have inspired in me a feeling of aversion.”

Woodrow Wilson (1856–1924) American politician, 28th president of the United States (in office from 1913 to 1921)

Source: Manfred F. Boemeke: Woodrow Wilson’s Image of Germany. In: Manfred Boemeke u. a. (Hrsg.): The Treaty of Versailles. A Reassessment after 75 Years. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge 1998, S. 603–614, hier S. 603., https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Woodrow_Wilson#Haltung_zu_Deutschland

“We have found that it's a good idea to read as many authors and as many different genres as possible. That way, we can learn more about writing and it gives us ideas to try different things.”

Marcia Jones (writer) (1958) American author

Marcia Thornton Jones Interview https://web.archive.org/web/20121024121117/http://www.scholastic.com/teachers/article/marcia-thornton-jones-interview-transcript (1997)

“I was always determined to find just the right book for that one child who maybe was a reluctant reader. I knew there was a book to turn him on to reading. I just had to find it. I do have a special place in my heart for kids who maybe have trouble reading or who just don't want to for various reasons. It's always my goal to write books that will somehow entice them to want to read.”

Debbie Dadey (1959) American children's writer

Children's author Debbie Dadey visiting downtown library to sign books, brainstorm. https://lancasteronline.com/features/entertainment/children-s-author-debbie-dadey-visiting-downtown-library-to-sign/article_bf6e4607-f0ba-5e73-a88f-64c9cb876bb2.html (July 29, 2013)

“Draw from your imagination and read whatever gets you excited.”

John Steven Gurney https://clifonline.org/john-steven-gurney-illustrator-author/ (March 30, 2021)

Bell Hooks photo

“I have wanted them to have this simple definition to read again and again so they know: Feminism is a movement to end sexism, sexist exploitation, and oppression.”

Bell Hooks (1952) American author, feminist, and social activist

Feminism is for Everybody: Passionate Politics (2014), p.XII

Céline Cousteau photo

“Whenever I look at any environmental story, whether it’s oceans, jungles, Antarctica, or the Amazon, I look at the human side to translate it in a relevant way for human beings. It makes it more relevant and compelling to people who are watching, listening, reading.”

Céline Cousteau (1972) French-American explorer, filmmaker, and diver

Amazon ‘Tribes on the Edge’: Q&A with documentary filmmaker Céline Cousteau https://www.thenewleam.com/2021/04/amazon-tribes-on-the-edge-qa-with-documentary-filmmaker-celine-cousteau/ (April 22, 2021)

James Mattis photo

“Reading sheds light on our dark path ahead. By traveling into the past, I enhance my grasp of the present.”

James Mattis (1950) 26th and current United States Secretary of Defense; United States Marine Corps general

Source: Call Sign Chaos: Learning to Lead (2019), p. 42

Gautama Buddha photo