I am not a speed reader. I am a speed understander.

The finest works of art are precious, among other reasons, because they make it possible for us to know, if only imperfectly and for a little while, what it actually feels like to think subtly and feel nobly.

What you guys want, I’m for.

To understand the power of the priesthood, we must know its limitations.

You pity the fool because you don’t want to beat up a fool! You know, pity is between sorry and mercy. See, if you pity him, you know, you won’t have to beat him up. So that’s why I say fools, you gotta give another chance because they don’t know no better. That’s why I pity them!

This report, by its very length, defends itself against the risk of being read.

Imagination is a poor matter when it has to part company with understanding.

When you’re young, you keep reading new writers and you keep changing your mind about how you ought to sound.

Philosophy is written in this grand book, the universe, which stands continually open to our gaze. But the book cannot be understood unless one first learns to comprehend the language and read the letters in which it is composed.

A child of five would understand this. Send someone to fetch a child of five.

People look at the same passage, and one person will say this is the best thing he’s ever read, and another person will say it’s absolutely idiotic. I mean, there’s no way to reconcile those two things. You just have to forget the whole business of what people are saying.

Books serve to show a man that those original thoughts of his aren’t very new at all.

The true university of these days is a collection of books.

A child wants things to be a certain way. When you get to be an adult, you just understand that some people are good, some are not, and you can’t be naive.

Books constitute capital. A library book lasts as long as a house, for hundreds of years. It is not, then, an article of mere consumption but fairly of capital, and often in the case of professional men, setting out in life, it is their only capital.

A physician is not angry at the intemperance of a mad patient, nor does he take it ill to be railed at by a man in fever. Just so should a wise man treat all mankind, as a physician does his patient, and look upon them only as sick and extravagant.

All books are divisible into two classes, the books of the hour, and the books of all time.

There is no author whose books I look forward to more than Vaclav Smil.

Every man who knows how to read has it in his power to magnify himself, to multiply the ways in which he exists, to make his life full, significant and interesting.

My mother insisted that her children read.

When I was seven or eight years old, I began to read the science-fiction magazines that were brought by guests into my grandparents‘ boarding house in Waukegan, Illinois. Those were the years when Hugo Gernsback was publishing ‚Amazing Stories,‘ with vivid, appallingly imaginative cover paintings that fed my hungry imagination.

I must say I find television very educational. The minute somebody turns it on, I go to the library and read a good book.

It is only in his music, which Americans are able to admire because a protective sentimentality limits their understanding of it, that the Negro in America has been able to tell his story.

To know anything well involves a profound sensation of ignorance.

I’m always reading the next book. Taking notes. Highlighting, researching, studying. It doesn’t stop.

I’m terrible at reading scripts. I love to read, and I hate reading scripts.

When people talk, listen completely. Most people never listen.

I like to read books. I like to listen to music.

You’re never too old, too wacky, too wild, to pick up a book and read to a child.

Japan’s very interesting. Some people think it copies things. I don’t think that anymore. I think what they do is reinvent things. They will get something that’s already been invented and study it until they thoroughly understand it. In some cases, they understand it better than the original inventor.

When a man says he had pleasure with a woman he does not mean conversation.

Mystery creates wonder and wonder is the basis of man’s desire to understand.

Listen with the intent to understand, not the intent to reply.

The answer I found is you stay away from the people who make fun of you, and you join these ad hoc groups who understand your craziness.

I used to take my short stories to girls‘ homes and read them to them. Can you imagine the reaction reading a short story to a girl instead of pawing her?

There’s always going to be people who don’t understand or accept the united science, and I will just ignore them, as I’m only acting and communicating on the science.

Employ your time in improving yourself by other men’s writings, so that you shall gain easily what others have labored hard for.

Black people comprehend the South. We understand its weight. It has rested on our backs… I knew that my heart would break if ever I put my foot down on that soil, moist, still, with old hurts. I had to face the fear/loathing at its source or it would consume me whole.

A book has got smell. A new book smells great. An old book smells even better. An old book smells like ancient Egypt.

I hope I have helped to raise the profile of science and to show that physics is not a mystery but can be understood by ordinary people.

Faith must trample under foot all reason, sense, and understanding.

I got interested in reading very early, because a story was read to me, by Hans Christian Andersen, which was ‚The Little Mermaid,‘ and I don’t know if you remember ‚The Little Mermaid,‘ but it’s dreadfully sad. The little mermaid falls in love with this prince, but she cannot marry him because she is a mermaid.

The highest activity a human being can attain is learning for understanding, because to understand is to be free.

Tis but a part we see, and not a whole.

Just be a cool grandpa who’s creative, and hang out and tell stories and read a book in the library.

A man does not know what he is saying until he knows what he is not saying.

With compassion you can die for other people, like the mother who can die for her child. You have the courage to say it because you are not afraid of losing anything, because you know that understanding and love is the foundation of happiness. But if you have fear of losing your status, your position, you will not have the courage to do it.

I’ve actually not read any books on time management.

There is no Frigate like a book to take us lands away nor any coursers like a page of prancing Poetry.

The most important thing is to read as much as you can, like I did. It will give you an understanding of what makes good writing and it will enlarge your vocabulary.

Books can only reveal us to ourselves, and as often as they do us this service we lay them aside.

I think if you follow anyone home, whether they live in Houston or London, and you sit at their dinner table and talk to them about their mother who has cancer or their child who is struggling in school, and their fears about watching their lives go by, I think we’re all the same.

A toddling little girl is a centre of common feeling which makes the most dissimilar people understand each other.

I would go to the deeps a hundred times to cheer a downcast spirit. It is good for me to have been afflicted, that I might know how to speak a word in season to one that is weary.

I’m not a very creative person, you know? I’m not really an art person. I’m not a great reader or writer or artist or musician.

Hear reason, or she’ll make you feel her.

The moment you think you understand a great work of art, it’s dead for you.

I’m tall, fat, rather bald, red-faced, double-chinned, black-haired, have a deep voice, and wear glasses for reading.

The man who does not read good books has no advantage over the man who cannot read them.

A book worth reading is worth buying.

Meditation demands an astonishingly alert mind; it is the understanding of the totality of life in which every form of fragmentation has ceased.