Neil deGrasse Tyson Quotes

I was the kind of kid whose parents would drop him off at the local town library on their way to work, and I'd go and work my way through the children's area.

Reading was very important to me as a kid. It was very inspirational to me. I went to a school where that wasn't encouraged so much, but my parents encouraged that, and it has made me part of who I am.

Your library is your portrait.

Libraries allow children to ask questions about the world and find the answers. And the wonderful thing is that once a child learns to use a library, the doors to learning are always open.

A love of books, of holding a book, turning its pages, looking at its pictures, and living its fascinating stories goes hand-in-hand with a love of learning.

And my father always took me to the library. We were both book addicts.

It is the interest one takes in books that makes a library. And if a library have interest it is; if not, it isn't.

It is lamentable, that many of our children go to school, from four until they are eight or ten, and sometimes fifteen years of age, and leave school knowing but a little more about the grammar of their language than a horse does about handling a musket--and not a few of them are really so ignorant, that they are unable to answer a person correctly, general questions in geography, and to hear them read, would only be to disgust a man who has a taste for reading; which, to do well as trifling as it may appear to some, (to the ignorant in particular) is a great part of learning. Some few of them, may make out to scribble tolerably well, over a half sheet of paper, which I believe has hitherto been a powerful obstacle in our way, to keep us from acquiring knowledge. An ignorant father, who knows no more than what nature has taught him, together with what little he acquires by the senses of hearing and seeing, finding his son able to write a neat hand, sets it down for granted that he has as good learning as any body; the young, ignorant gump, hearing his father or mother, who perhaps may be ten times more ignorant, in point of literature, than himself, extolling his learning, struts about, in the full assurance, that his attainments in literature are sufficient to take him through the world, when, in fact, he has scarcely any learning at all!!!!

I grew up in a house full of books.

I don't recall my parents ever steering me toward or away from science. It was more that I was steered toward learning and excellence in the classroom.

Seeing that we were book enthusiasts, my mother began hauling my sister and me down to the Stanton Free Library on Tuesday afternoons, where I'd find two or three books to bring home.

Yeah, because I think it's more important just to inspire people to wake up one day and pick up a book and start feeling it out for themselves.

The more that you read, the more things you will know. The more that you learn, the more places you'll go.

When I was younger, I was full of smart things to say about all my books.

Hungry man, reach for the book: it is a weapon.

Naturally, I have compensated in my adult years by owning very large numbers of books.

I like reading. I just hate school.

Education was the most important value in our home when I was growing up. People don't always realize that my parents shared a sense of intellectual curiosity and a love of reading and of history.

I would rather be poor in a cottage full of books than a king without the desire to read.

If you can't read, the only thing you can do is enjoy the pictures, not the whole story. Reading is the key to knowledge. Knowledge is the key to understanding. So read on, young man! Read on, young lady!

And if you are a parent, introduce your children to their neighborhood library. It will give them a real sense of independence to have their own library card and enjoy borrowing books.

What we become depends on what we read after all of the professors have finished with us. The greatest university of all is a collection of books.

My father was an engineer - he wasn't literary, not a writer or a journalist, but he was one of the world's great readers. Every two weeks, he'd take me to our local branch library and pull books off the shelf for me, stacking them up in my arms - 'Have you read this? And this? And this?'

There are many little ways to enlarge your child's world. Love of books is the best of all.

I am what libraries and librarians have made me, with little assistance from a professor of Greek and poets.