Voltaire

The opportunity for doing mischief is found a hundred times a day, and of doing good once in a year.

Let us read, and let us dance; these two amusements will never do any harm to the world.

He who has not the spirit of this age, has all the misery of it.

Very often, say what you will, a knave is only a fool.

Superstition is to religion what astrology is to astronomy the mad daughter of a wise mother. These daughters have too long dominated the earth.

Despite the enormous quantity of books, how few people read! And if one reads profitably, one would realize how much stupid stuff the vulgar herd is content to swallow every day.

All great literature is one of two stories; a man goes on a journey or a stranger comes to town.

Some books leave us free and some books make us free.

Books must be read as deliberately and reservedly as they were written.

When I look back, I am so impressed again with the life-giving power of literature. If I were a young person today, trying to gain a sense of myself in the world, I would do that again by reading, just as I did when I was young.

Tis the good reader that makes the good book.

The oldest books are still only just out to those who have not read them.

Books are the best of things if well used; if abused, among the worst. They are good for nothing but to inspire. I had better never see a book than be warped by its attraction clean out of my own orbit, and made a satellite instead of a system.

Be careful about reading health books. You may die of a misprint.

I haven’t any right to criticize books, and I don’t do it except when I hate them. I often want to criticize Jane Austen, but her books madden me so that I can’t conceal my frenzy from the reader; and therefore I have to stop every time I begin. Every time I read Pride and Prejudice I want to dig her up and beat her over the skull with her own shin-bone.

What can we see, read, acquire, but ourselves. Take the book, my friend, and read your eyes out, you will never find there what I find.

So please, oh please, we beg, we pray, go throw your TV set away, and in its place you can install, a lovely bookshelf on the wall.

Make it a rule never to give a child a book you would not read yourself.

Why not blame the libraries? They’re full of violent books.

Whatever our fate is or may be, we have made it and do not complain of it. – Vronksy (Anna Karenina)

A truly good book teaches me better than to read it. I must soon lay it down, and commence living on its hint. What I began by reading, I must finish by acting.