My Favorite Reading Quotes

1. “The reading of all good books is like a conversation with the finest minds of past centuries.” — Descartes

2. “If you only read the books that everyone else is reading, you can only think what everyone else is thinking.” — Haruki Murakami

3. "The task is not so much to see what no one has yet seen, but to think what nobody yet has thought about that which everybody sees."

⁠— Arthur Schopenhauer

4. “You could try to pound your head against the wall and think of original ideas or you can cheat by reading them in books." - @patrickc

5. “Reading books is the real-life version of collecting mushrooms in Super Mario.” — Some random tweet I once read

6. "It's not information overload. It's filter failure." - Clay Shirky

7. "You can try to improve how much you learn from each book, but probably the greatest gains from selecting the right set of books to read. Those books are likely older than the ones that are really popular today."

- @eugenewei

8. "The originality of an idea depends on the obscurity of sources." — John Hegarty

9. “If we are uneducated we shall not know how very old are all new ideas.” – G. K. Chesterton

10. “Two ways to be successful in life: do something worth writing about or write something worth reading.” -Ben Franklin

11. “The true test of all books is the influence they have upon the lives and conduct of their readers.” -Charles Helman Lea

(h/t @BrentBeshore)

"A book is proof that humans are capable of working magic." – Carl Sagan

(h/t @visakanv)

13. “If I read a book that cost me $20 and I get one good idea, I’ve gotten one of the greatest bargains of all time.” — Tom Peters

14. "The man who doesn't read good books has no advantage over the man who can't read them." — Mark Twain

(h/t @LibertyRPF)

15. “Books are the carriers of civilization.

Without books, history is silent, literature dumb, science crippled, thought and speculation at a standstill.”

— Barbara Tuchman

(h/t @aleksndr_r)

16. “You will be the same person in five years as you are today, except for the people you meet and the books you read.”

— John Wooden

(h/t @flybrand)

17. “Read better writers than you are.

In other words, read great fiction. Cultivate your ear.

Before I go to bed, I read a novel every night. That’s because you do a lot of work in your sleep, and I want my brain to be in a rhythm of good prose."

— Michael Pollan

18. “The trick is to be bored with a specific book, rather than the act of reading.”

— Nassim Taleb ( @nntaleb)

19. "Books are like love, simultaneously overrated and underrated." — @Kpaxs

20. "I got a lot of my education from history. Rather than reading a lot more about the contemporaries I would go back & read about Ford, Rockefeller, Edison, Morgan." — @pmarca

(h/t @JakeCahan)

21. This is a strong contender for my favorite reading quote of all time.

22. "When people speak in a very elaborate and sophisticated way, they either want to tell a lie, or to admire themselves. You should not believe such people. Good speech is always clear, clever, and understood by all."

— Leo Tolstoy

23. Albert Einstein on the dangers of only reading recently published writing.

"He is completely dependent on the prejudices and fashions of his times, since he never gets to see or heard anything else."

24. “We all get socialized once by our parents and teachers, ministers and priests. [Reading great books] is about getting a second chance. It’s not about being born again, but about growing up a second time, this time around as your own educator and guide.”

— Mark Edmundson

25. “You could try to pound your head against the wall and think of original ideas or you can cheat by reading them in books."

— @patrickc

(h/t @JamesClear)

Two quotes, both from Charlie Munger.

26. "If it is wisdom you're after, you're going to spend a lot of time on your ass reading."

27. "In my whole life, I have known no wise people (over a broad subject matter area) who didn't read all the time — none, zero."

(h/t @JakeCahan)

28. "For a world quite preoccupied with magic, mushrooms, myth, and consciousness expansion, it surprises me just how many people have to be convinced that the humble book is capable of melting your ego as surely as any trip."

— @samlearns

29. “You must write every single day of your life... You must lurk in libraries and climb the stacks like ladders to sniff books like perfumes and wear books like hats upon your crazy heads... may you be in love every day for the next 20,000 days."

— Ray Bradbury

30. “When you first start to study a field, it seems like you have to memorize a zillion things. You don’t. What you need is to identify the core principles that govern the field. The million things you thought you had to memorize are various combinations of the core principles.“