Ralph Waldo Emerson Quotes

Learning how to be a good reader is what makes you a writer.

Good readers make much out of little.

Tis the good reader that makes the good book.

The better the book the more room for the reader.

We are now in want of an art to teach how books are to be read rather than to read them. Such an art is practicable.

Better readers are better thinkers.

Besides, rereading, not reading, is what counts.

He has only half learned the art of reading who has not added to it the more refined art of skipping and skimming.

I believe that writing is derivative. I think good writing comes from good reading.

I don't think there's anything wrong with someone having to read a poem twice. Or even a book.

I'm not well-read, but when I read, I read well.

We are not only what we read. We are how we read.

I worry that the superficial way we read during the day is affecting us when we have to read with more in-depth processing.

What is reading but silent conversation?

No book, however good, can survive a hostile reading.

In the past few years I've assigned books to be read before a student attends one of my weeklong seminars. I have been astonished by how few people -- people who supposedly want to write -- read books, and if they read them, how little they examine them.

A good book deserves an active reading. The activity of reading does not stop with the work of understanding what a book says. It must be completed by the work of criticism, the work of judging. The undemanding reader fails to satisfy this requirement, probably even more than he fails to analyze and interpret. He not only makes no effort to understand; he also dismisses a book simply by putting it aside and forgetting it. Worse than faintly praising it, he damns it by giving it no critical consideration whatever.

Ideally, we should like to define a good book as one which 'permits, invites, or compels' good reading

For those who are going to learn from books, learning the art of reading would seem to be indispensable.

It is my contention that the process of reading is part of the process of writing, the necessary completion without which writing can hardly be said to exist.

For heaven's sake, don't write writing. Write reading!

We are never allowed to forget that some books are badly written; we should remember that sometimes they're badly read, too.

Curiously enough, one cannot read a book; one can only reread it. A good reader, a major reader, and active and creative reader is a rereader.

The novelist teaches the reader to comprehend the world as a question.

There is then creative reading as well as creative writing. When the mind is braced by labor and invention, the page of whatever book we read becomes luminous with manifold allusion. Every sentence is doubly significant, and the sense of our author is as broad as the world.