"In the case of good books, the point is not to see how many of them you can get through, but rather how many can get through to you."
- Mortimer J. Adler
"Show me a family of readers, and I will show you the people who move the world."
- Napoleon Bonaparte
"Books are the quietest and most constant of friends; they are the most accessible and wisest of counselors, and the most patient of teachers."
- Charles W. Eliot
“Not all readers are leaders, but all leaders are readers.”
- President Harry Truman
"You don’t have to burn books to destroy a culture. Just get people to stop reading them."
- Ray Bradbury
"Do not read, as children do, to amuse yourself, or like the ambitious, for the purpose of instruction. No, read in order to live."
- Gustave Flaubert
"A reader lives a thousand lives before he dies… the man who never reads lives only one."
- George R.R. Martin
"I think we ought to read only the kind of books that wound or stab us. If the book we’re reading doesn’t wake us up with a blow to the head, what are we reading for? So that it will make us happy, as you write? Good Lord, we would be happy precisely if we had no books, and the kind of books that make us happy are the kind we could write ourselves if we had to. But we need books that affect us like a disaster, that grieve us deeply, like the death of someone we loved more than ourselves, like being banished into forests far from everyone, like a suicide. A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us. That is my belief."
- Franz Kafka