Michel de Montaigne Quotes

I read here and there in books, enjoying the examples and ignoring the argument.

I'll tell you what I think. I think you need to stay indoors reading more books!

Take a book, the poorest one written, but read it with the passion that it is the only book you will read. Ultimately, you will read everything out of it, that is, as much as there was in yourself, and you could never get more out of reading, even if you read the best of books.

If people like to read their books, it is all very well, but to be at so much trouble in filling great volumes, which, as I used to think, nobody would willingly ever look into, to be labouring only for the torment of little boys and girls, always struck me as a hard fate.

I 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 whatever end I like best.

Books are the curse of the human race.

Read, every day, something no one else is reading. Think, every day, something no one else is thinking.

All my good reading, you might say, was done in the toilet. There are passages in Ulysses which can be read only in the toilet - if one wants to extract the full flavor of their content.

If we encounter a man of rare intellect, we should ask him what books he reads.

My alma mater was books, a good library.

Life is too short to live with any but the greatest books.

What can we see, read, acquire, but ourselves. Take the book, my friend, and read your eyes out, you will never find there what I find.

Every book is good to read which sets the reader in a working mood.

Be a little careful about your library. Do you foresee what you will do with it? Very little to be sure. But the real question is what it will do with you? You will come here and get books that will open your eyes, and your ears, and your curiosity, and turn you inside out or outside in.

Some read to think, these are rare; some to write, these are common; and some read to talk, and these form the great majority.

Clearly one must read every good book at least once every ten years.

Reading a book is like re-writing it for yourself.

Books have always a secret influence on the understanding.

By the consultation of books, whether of dead or living authors, many temptations to petulance and opposition, which occur in oral conferences, are avoided. An author cannot obtrude his service unasked, nor can be often suspected of any malignant intention to insult his readers with his knowledge or his wit. Yet so prevalent is the habit of comparing ourselves with others, while they remain within the reach of our passions, that books are seldom read with complete impartiality, but by those from whom the writer is placed at such a distance that his life or death is indifferent.

I read the book and I think, "Well, this is the movie we're going to make," and then someone else reads it, and they take a completely different movie from it. And both are valid.

What did it say when a man had fewer clothes than books?

As a rule I had a distaste for any reading beyond my school books.

Books are defensive, not offensive (unless you're the puzzled adult trying to make the kid with the book interact).

Far more seemly to have thy study full of books, than thy purse full of money.

I don't read books for pleasure, but in desperation.