William Hazlitt Quotes

the process of reading is reciprocal; the book is no more than a formula, to be furnished out with images out of the reader's mind.

We find little in a book but what we put there. But in great books, the mind finds room to put many things.

There is something wonderful about a book. We can pick it up. We can heft it. We can read it. We can set it down. We can think of what we have read. It does something for us. We can share great minds, great actions, and great undertakings in the pages of a book.

A book is quite a beautiful thing, even more so learning. Together, however, all they amount to is called book-learning.

One reads books in order to gain the privilege of living more than one life. People who don't read are trapped in a mine shaft, even if they think the sun is shining.

..holding a book but reading the empty spaces.

Almost all of my many passionate interests, and my many changes of mind, came through books. Books prompted the many vows I made to myself.

Whatever we may say against collections, which present authors in a disjointed form, they nevertheless bring about many excellent results. We are not always so composed, so full of wisdom, that we are able to take in at once the whole scope of a work according to its merits. Do we not mark in a book passages which seem to have a direct reference to ourselves? Young people especially, who have failed in acquiring a complete cultivation of mind, are roused in a praiseworthy way by brilliant passages.

Books are the training weights of the mind.

Anything we need to know, we can learn it from a book. Reading, careful study, a little practice, and we’re throwing knives expertly, overhauling engines, speaking Esperanto like natives.

Books are but stepping stones to show you where other minds have been.

[Wave of bestselling conservative commentators] it's kind of like reading The Power Of Positive Thinking, or any other advice or how-to book. All they do is reassure people of their basic opinions, and then they can continue to act like they've always acted. I'd say it's time to move on to something else, but I don't know what it would be.

I have decided that the trouble with print is, it never changes its mind.

Books are the most mannerly of companions, accessible at all times, in all moods, frankly declaring the author's mind, without offense.

Books seem to me to be pestilent things, and infect all that trade in them...with something very perverse and brutal. Printers, binders, sellers, and others that make a trade and gain out of them have universally so odd a turn and corruption of mind that they have a way of dealing peculiar to themselves, and not conformed to the good of society and that general fairness which cements mankind.

read thousands of books and I will power myself with knowledge. Pens and books are the weapons that defeat terrorism.

... the subjective viewpoint is the only one to use regarding a library. Your true library is a collection of the books you want.You may have deplorably poor taste or bad judgment. Never mind. Correct those traits before you exchange your books.

Hence, instead of Man Thinking, we have the bookworm. Hence, the book-learned class, who value books, as such; not as related to nature and the human constitution, but as making a sort of Third Estate with the world and the soul. Hence, the restorers of readings, the emendators, the bibliomaniacs of all degrees.

It is chiefly through books that we enjoy the intercourse with superior minds.

Talking over the things which you have read with your companions fixes them on the mind.

Here you discover that so long as books are kept open, then minds can never be closed.

I am not ambitious to appear a man of letters: I could be content the world should think I had scarce looked upon any other book than that of nature.

Before you can become a writer, you have to be a reader, and a reader of everything, at that. To the best of my recollection, I became a reader at the age of 10 and have never stopped. Like many authors, I read all sorts of books all the time, and it is amazing how the mind fills up.

nothing decorates a home like books. There they are, waiting to decorate the mind, too!