Arnold Bennett Quotes

I know people who read and read, and for all the good it does them, they might as well cut bread and butter. Unless you give at least 45 minutes of careful, fatiguing reflection upon what you are reading, your minutes are chiefly wasted.

What counts, in the long run, is not what you read; it is what you sift through your own mind; it is the ideas and impressions that are aroused in you by your reading. It is the ideas stirred in your own mind, the ideas which are a reflection of your own thinking, which make you an interesting person

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.

Whatever we read from intense curiosity gives us the model of how we should always read. Plodding along page after page with an equal attention to each word results in attention to mere words.

The adult relation to books is one of absorbing rather than being absorbed.

Learn to be good readers, which is perhaps a more difficult thing than you imagine. Learn to be discriminative in your reading; to read faithfully, and with your best attention, all kinds of things which you have a real interest in,--a real, not an imaginary,--and which you find to be really fit for what you are engaged in.

Books are to be called for and supplied on the assumption that the process of reading is not a half-sleep, but in the highest sense an exercise, a gymnastic struggle; that the reader is to do something for himself.

No book can be so good, as to be profitable when negligently read.

A critic is a reader who ruminates. Thus, he should have more than one stomach.

I recommend the art of slow reading.

I will say this: I know no wise person who doesn't read a lot. I suspect that you can read on the computer now and get a lot of benefit out of it, but I doubt that it'll work as well as reading print worked for me.

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

I'm actually not that big a fan of reading.

Typically, when you read, you have more time to think. Reading gives you a unique pause button for comprehension and insight. By and large, with oral language - when you watch a film or listen to a tape - you don't press pause.

There are books that are made for you to sit and puzzle over and spend time with.

The process of reading is not a half sleep, but in the highest sense, an exercise, a gymnast's struggle: that the reader is to do something for him or herself, must be on the alert, just construct indeed the poem, argument, history, metaphysical essay--the text furnishing the hints, the clue, the start, the framework.

Good readers make much out of little.

The mind should be accustomed to make wise reflections, and draw curious conclusions as it goes along; the habitude of which made Pliny the Younger affirm that he never read book so bad but he drew some profit from it.

What is reading but silent conversation?

Reading a book should not be a passive exercise, but rather a raucous conversation.

Tis the good reader that makes the good book.

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

The first class of readers may be compared to an hour-glass, their reading being as the sand; it runs in and runs out, and leaves not a vestige behind. A second class resembles a sponge, which imbibes everything, and returns it in nearly the same state, only a little dirtier. A third class is like a jelly-bag, which allows all that is pure to pass away, and retains only the refuse and dregs. The fourth class may be compared to the slave of Golconda, who, casting aside all that is worthless, preserves only the pure gems.

When we read too fast or too slowly, we understand nothing.

... we must read, not only for what we read but for what it makes us think.