“I took a speed-reading course and read War and Peace in twenty minutes. It involves Russia.”
Woody Allen
“I’m speed reading a book on the history of glue. I can’t put it down.”
“Brevity is the soul of wit.”
William Shakespeare, read summaries of William Shakespeare
“Did you hear about the kidnapping at school? He woke up.”
“Turn,” Liz said, trying not to hide her impatience at being forced to read at non-speed-of-light pace.”
Only the Good Spy Young
“For Our Purposes, I define “reading” as looking at printed words and getting enough meaning from them to satisfy your purpose.”
“Some books are undeservedly forgotten, some are undeservedly remembered.”
WH Auden
“We are of opinion that instead of letting books grow moldy behind an iron grating, far from the vulgar gaze, it is better to let them wear out by being read.”
Jules Verne
‘To understand a book, you must approach it, first, as a whole, having a unity and a structure of part; and second, in terms of its elements, its units of language and thought.”
Mortimer Adler “How to Read a Book’’ (read the summary)
“My alma mater was books, a good library…. I could spend the rest of my life reading, just satisfying my curiosity.”
Malcolm X
“It’s not that I don’t like people. It’s just that when I’m in the company of others – even my nearest and dearest – there always comes a moment when I’d rather be reading a book.”
Maureen Corrigan
“Books to the ceiling, Books to the sky, My pile of books is a mile high. How I love them! How I need them! I’ll have a long beard by the time I read them.”
Arnold Lobel
“There is nothing more luxurious than eating while you read—unless it be reading while you eat.”
E. Nesbit
“I love the smell of book ink in the morning.”
“One glance at a book and you hear the voice of another person, perhaps someone dead for 1,000 years. To read is to voyage through time.”
Carl Sagan
“I have a passion for teaching kids to become readers, to become comfortable with a book, not daunted. Books shouldn’t be daunting, they should be funny, exciting and wonderful; and learning to be a reader gives a terrific advantage.”
Roald Dahl
“Man reading should be man intensely alive. The book should be a ball of light in one’s hand.”
Ezra Pound
“A bad book is as much a labor to write as a good one; it comes as sincerely from the author’s soul.”
Aldous Huxley
“If we encounter a man of rare intellect, we should ask him what books he reads.”
Ralph Waldo Emerson
“Reading is one of our bad habits. … We read, most of the time, not because we wish to instruct ourselves, not because we long to have our feelings touched and our imagination fired, but … because we have time to spare.”
Aldous Huxley
“A classic is something that everybody wants to have read and nobody wants to read.”
“Always read something that will make you look good if you die in the middle of it.”
P.J. O’Rourke
“Many people, myself among them, feel better at the mere sight of a book.”
Jane Smiley
“Beware of the person of one book.”
Thomas Aquinas
“Read the best books first, or you may not have a chance to read them at all.”
Henry David Thoreau
“Make it a rule never to give a child a book you would not read yourself.”
George Bernard Shaw
“Every great advance in natural knowledge has involved the absolute rejection of authority.”
Thomas Huxley, 1870
“Books serve to show a man that those original thoughts of his aren’t very new after all.”
Abraham Lincoln
“What is a book? Is it the thing in the mind of the creator? Or is it the volume here on the table? Or is it what happens when that volume is taken up and read by somebody? The book is all three of those, in different senses. And this is what Rumi said in one of his mediations, that the Spirit is the wellspring, it is the cup that conveys the water and it is the water that quenches the thirst of those who are thirsty.”
Iain McGilchrist, author of The Master and His Emissary, subtitled The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World
“I can’t imagine a man really enjoying a book and reading it only once.”
C.S. Lewis
“And if our book consumption remains as low as it has been, at least let us admit that it is because reading is a less exciting pastime than going to the dogs, the pictures or the pub, and not because books, whether bought or borrowed, are too expensive.”
George Orwell
“There is no mistaking a good book when one meets it. It is like falling in love.”
“There is more than one way to burn a book. And the world is full of people running about with lit matches.”
Ray Bradbury author of FAHRENHEIT 451 (read the summary)
“You know you’ve read a good book when you turn the last page and feel a little as if you have lost a friend.”
Paul Sweeney
“محتوى المادة التي تقوم بقراءتها وحجم الخط وحالتك النفسية وأُلفتك للموضوع والهدف منة,جميعها عوامل رئيسية تؤثر على سرعتك في القراءة”
Work Smarter with Speed Reading: A Teach Yourself Guide
“Great speed in reading is a dubious achievement; it is of value only if what you have to read is not really worth reading. A better formula is this: Every book should be read no more slowly than it deserves, and no more quickly than you can read it with satisfaction and comprehension.”
How to Read a Book: The Classic Guide to Intelligent Reading
“Read in order to live.”
Gustave Flaubert
“I can read a book twice as fast as anybody else. First I read the beginning, and then I read the ending, and then I start in the middle and read toward whichever end I like best.”
Gracie Allen
“I am not a speed reader. I am a speed understander.”
Isaac Asimov
“My money weakness is that I go through a lot of books. I am a member of an all-male book club, and we meet up every three months and occasionally go off and do a book-linked excursion.”
Dr Michael Mosley
“The person who doesn’t read lives only one life. The reader lives 5,000. Reading is immortality backwards.”
Umberto Eco
“A reader lives a thousand lives before he dies . . . The man who never reads lives only one.”
George R.R. Martin
“Until I feared I would lose it, I never loved to read. One does not love breathing.”
Harper Lee
“Never trust anyone who has not brought a book with them.”
Lemony Snicket
“The best books… are those that tell you what you know already.”
George Orwell, 1984
“Until then I had thought each book spoke of the things, human or divine, that lie outside books. Now I realized that not infrequently books speak of books: it is as if they spoke among themselves. In the light of this reflection, the library seemed all the more disturbing to me. It was then the place of a long, centuries-old murmuring, an imperceptible dialogue between one parchment and another, a living thing, a receptacle of powers not to be ruled by a human mind, a treasure of secrets emanated by many minds, surviving the death of those who had produced them or had been their conveyors.”
The Name of the Rose
“You can never get a cup of tea large enough or a book long enough to suit me.”
C.S. Lewis
“Reading is essential for those who seek to rise above the ordinary.”
Jim Rohn
“The more that you read, the more things you will know. The more that you learn, the more places you’ll go.”
Dr. Seuss
“I find television very educating. Every time somebody turns on the set, I go into the other room and read a book.”
Groucho Marx
“If you don’t like to read, you haven’t found the right book.”
J.K. Rowling
“Think before you speak. Read before you think.”
Fran Lebowitz
“I intend to put up with nothing that I can put down.”
Edgar Allan Poe
“The books one reads in childhood, and perhaps most of all the bad and good bad books, create in one’s mind a sort of false map of the world, a series of fabulous countries into which one can retreat at odd moments throughout the rest of life, and which in some cases can survive a visit to the real countries which they are supposed to represent.”
George Orwell
“Books are not made for furniture, but there is nothing else that so beautifully furnishes a house.”
Henry Ward Beecher
“There are worse crimes than burning books. One of them is not reading them.”
Joseph Brodsky
“I declare after all there is no enjoyment like reading! How much sooner one tires of any thing than of a book! — When I have a house of my own, I shall be miserable if I have not an excellent library.”
Jane Austen
“A sure sign of a good book is that you like it more the older you get.”
“A book is a mirror; if an ass peers into it, you can’t expect an apostle to peer out.”
“Books break the shackles of time – proof that humans can work magic.”
Carl Sagan
“Employ your time in improving yourself by other men’s writings so that you shall come easily by what others have laboured hard for.”
Socrates
“The best moments in reading are when you come across something – a thought, a feeling, a way of looking at things – which you had thought special and particular to you. Now here it is, set down by someone else, a person you have never met, someone even who long dead. And it is as if a hand has come out and taken yours.” Alan Bennett (in The History Boys where he writes another great insight, not about reading but about history: “History is a commentary on the various and continuing incapabilities of men. What is history? History is women following behind with the bucket.” said Mrs Lintott)
“For my whole life, my favorite activity was reading. It’s not the most social pastime.”
Audrey Hepburn
“Reading books is an intrinsically valuable thing. I can’t imagine enjoying life without books. But that doesn’t mean that life without books is not a good life.”
Dr. Claire Colebrook, Cultural theorist
“Reading for me, is spending time with a friend.”
Gary Paulsen
“With freedom, books flowers and the moon, who could not be happy.” Oscar Wild
“From the reading of ‘good books’ there comes a richness of life that can be obtained in no other way.”
Gordon B. Hinckley
“Fools have a habit of believing that everything written by a famous author is admirable. For my part I read only to please myself and like only what suits my taste.”
Voltaire
“How many a man has dated a new era in his life from the reading of a book.”
Henry David Thoreau
“Reading is a basic tool in the living of a good life.”
Mortimer J. Adler
“A children’s story that can only be enjoyed by children is not a good children’s story in the slightest.”
C.S. Lewis
“It is a great thing to start life with a small number of really good books which are your very own.”
Arthur Conan Doyle
“What better occupation, really, than to spend the evening at the fireside with a book, with the wind beating on the windows and the lamp burning bright.”
Gustave Flaubert
“I’m old-fashioned and think that reading books is the most glorious pastime that humankind has yet devised.”
Wisława Szymborska
“Never put off till tomorrow the book you can read today.”
Holbrook Jackson
“What kind of life can you have in a house without books?”
Sherman Alexie
“Of course anyone who truly loves books buys more of them than he or she can hope to read in one fleeting lifetime. A good book, resting unopened in its slot on a shelf, full of majestic potentiality, is the most comforting sort of intellectual wallpaper.” David Quammen
“Let’s be reasonable and add an eighth day to the week that is devoted exclusively to reading.”
Lena Dunham
“The reading of all good books is like conversation with the finest (people) of the past centuries.”
Descartes
“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
“Reading one book is like eating one potato chip.”
Diane Duane
“Books are a uniquely portable magic.”
Stephen King
“I read a book one day and my whole life was changed.”
Orhan Pamuk
“Good friends, good books, and a sleepy conscience: this is the ideal life.”
Mark Twain
“People say that life is the thing, but I prefer reading.”
Logan Pearsall Smith
“Today a reader, tomorrow a leader.”
Margaret Fuller
“People can lose their lives in libraries. They ought to be warned.”
Saul Bellow
“A good book is an event in my life.”
Stendhal
“Reading brings us unknown friends.”
Honoré de Balzac
“The world was hers for the reading.”
Betty Smith
“Some books leave us free and some books make us free.”
Ralph Waldo Emerson
“I kept always two books in my pocket, one to read, one to write in.”
Robert Louis Stevenson
“The person who deserves most pity is a lonesome one on a rainy day who doesn’t know how to read.”
Benjamin Franklin
“Once you have read a book you care about, some part of it is always with you.”
Louis L’Amour
“Literature is the most agreeable way of ignoring life.”
Fernando Pessoa
“No. I can survive well enough on my own—if given the proper reading material.”
Sarah J. Maas
“‘Classic’ – a book which people praise and don’t read.”
Mark Twain
“You don’t have to burn books to destroy a culture. Just get people to stop reading them.”
Ray Bradbury
“Surviving and thriving as a professional today demands two new approaches to the written word. First, it requires a new approach to orchestrating information, by skillfully choosing what to read and what to ignore. Second, it requires a new approach to integrating information, by reading faster and with greater comprehension.”
Jimmy Calano
“I took a course in speed reading. Then I got Reader’s Digest on microfilm. By the time I got the machine set up, I was done.”
Steven Wright
“The early development of speed reading can be traced to the beginning of the (20th) century, when the publication explosion swamped readers with more than they could possibly handle at normal reading rates.”
Tony Buzan
“If you can read this, you are already ‘speed‑reading’.The average adult reads 200 wpm, but you are reading this at 600 wpm. You can do this because you are reading whole ideas at a time. This course displays the text divided into actual thought‑units, which makes it easier to read groups of words at a glance. Thought‑units are easier and quicker to understand than individual words. This results in improved comprehension, which then leads to faster reading, plus better concentration and retention.”
“Modern research has shown that your eye-brain system is thousands of times more complex and powerful than had previously been estimated, and that with proper training you can quickly reap the benefits of this enormous potential.”
Tony Buzan
“Once you learn to read, you will be forever free.”
Frederick Douglas
“There are many little ways to enlarge your child’s world. Love of books is the best of all.”
Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis
“Wear the old coat and buy the new book.”
Austin Phelps
“You may have tangible wealth untold. Caskets of jewels and coffers of gold. Richer than I you can never be — I had a mother who read to me.”
Strickland Gillilan
“The man who does not read good books is no better than the man who can’t.”
Mark Twain
“As a speed reader, I’ve got only one fear – to run out of books to read.”
Anonymous
“If time is money and reading takes time, then I heartedly recommend saving money and time with this brilliant guide. For those of us in the fast lane, the PhotoReading Whole Mind System isn’t a luxury, it’s a necessity.”
Harvey Mackay, Author of Swim with the Sharks and Beware of the Naked Man
“To learn to read is to light a fire; every syllable that is spelled out is a spark.”
Victor Hugo
“Oh, magic hour, when a child first knows she can read printed words!”
Betty Smith
“A book is a gift you can open again and again.”
Garrison Keillor
“Fill your house with stacks of books, in all the crannies and all the nooks.”
Dr. Seuss
“I have seen Paul Scheele help countless numbers of people to discover a faster, more efficient path to success through his PhotoReading system. No matter what you need to read, he can teach you to get it done in a third of the time.”
Anthony Robbins, Author of Awaken the Giant Within and Unlimited Power
“Show me a family of readers, and I will show you the people who move the world.”
Napoléon Bonaparte
“A classic is a book that has never finished saying what it has to say.”
Italo Calvino
“I have always imagined that paradise will be a kind of library.”
Jorge Luis Borges
“Reading means borrowing.”
“Reading is a discount ticket to everywhere.”
Mary Schmich
“No entertainment is so cheap as reading, nor any pleasure so lasting.”
Mary Wortley Montagu
“If you are going to get anywhere in life you have to read a lot of books.”
Roald Dahl
“That perfect tranquillity of life, which is nowhere to be found but in retreat, a faithful friend and a good library.”
Aphra Behn
“To acquire the habit of reading is to construct for yourself a refuge from almost all the miseries of life.”
W. Somerset Maugham
“Rainy days should be spent at home with a cup of tea and a good book.”
Bill Watterson
“These books gave Matilda a hopeful and comforting message: You are not alone.”
Roald Dahl
“A problem is a way of creating a future. When plants grow and evolve they do so by way of problems, developing features to avoid predators, to maximise light or to retain moisture.” Claire Colebrook, philosopher and cultural theorist
“PhotoReading is the best way to get through the top business books of today.”
Brian Tracy, best-selling author and international expert on entrepreneurship and selling
“I guess there are never enough books.”
John Steinbeck
“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.”
Voltaire
“Libraries will get you through times of no money better than money will get you through times of no libraries.”
Anne Herbert
“Ah, how good it is to be among people who are reading.”
Rainer Maria Rilke
“Children are made readers on the laps of their parents.”
Emilie Buchwald
“I couldn’t live a week without a private library – indeed, I’d part with all my furniture and squat and sleep on the floor before I’d let go of the 1500 or so books I possess.”
H.P. Lovecraft
“If you read more slowly than you’d like, consider taking a course to increase not only your reading speed but also how fast you absorb the information. The best resource I’ve found is the PhotoReading course.”
Jack Canfield, writing in his New York Times bestselling book The Success Principles
Books are good company, in sad times and happy times, for books are people – people who have managed to stay alive by hiding between the covers of a book.”
E.B. White
“Luckily, I always travel with a book, just in case I have to wait on line for Santa, or some such inconvenience.”
David Levithan
“Outside of a dog, a book is a man’s best friend. Inside of a dog, it’s too dark to read.”
Groucho Marx
“Leaders today grasp new ideas quickly, read voraciously across many important topics, and need to stay current with the latest advances in their fields. The PhotoReading Whole Mind System shows me how to do it all.”
Ken Blanchard, Ph.D., Co-author of the eight-million selling One Minute Manager
“Somebody who only reads newspapers and at best books of contemporary authors looks to me like an extremely near-sighted person who scorns eyeglasses. He is completely dependent on the prejudices and fashions of his times, since he never gets to see or hear anything else.”
Albert Einstein
“I always read. You know how sharks have to keep swimming or they die? I’m like that. If I stop reading, I die.”
Patrick Rothfuss
“Even when reading is impossible, the presence of books acquired produces such an ecstasy that the buying of more books than one can read is nothing less than the soul reaching towards infinity … we cherish books even if unread, their mere presence exudes comfort, their ready access reassurance.”
A. Edward Newton, author and book collector – on the concept of tsundoku
“Books are a uniquely portable magic.” Stephen King
“Literature is the power of fiction itself: not making a claim about what the world is, but about the imagination of a possible world.”
Dr. Claire Colebrook, Cultural theorist
Books that changed my life and inspired me
As a speed reader, I completely agree with the anonymous quote above and I still have a bit of apprehension that I might run out of books to read. I love reading and I’ve read and speed read thousands of books in my life. Some books have literally changed and improved my life and some have transformed me as a human being. Books that changed my life and inspired me