Bertrand Russell Quotes

In the highest civilization the book is still the highest delight.

"Books ... books, ..." he exclaims. It is those that teach us to refine on our pleasures when young, and which, having so taught us, enable us to recall them with satisfaction when old.

The mere brute pleasure of reading - the sort of pleasure a cow must have in grazing.

He liked the mere act of reading, the magic of turning scratches on a page into words inside his head.

Some of the sweetest hours in life, in retrospect will be found to have been spent with books.

A principal aim of education is to give students a taste for literature, for the books of life and power, and to accomplish this, it is necessary that their minds be held aloof from the babblement and discussions of the hour, that they may accustom themselves to take interest in the words and deeds of the greatest men, and so make themselves able and worthy to shape a larger and nobler future; but if their hours of leisure are spent over journals and reviews, they will, in later years, become the helpless victims of the newspaper habit.

Most scholarly books we read for the information or insight they contain. But some we return to simply for the pleasure of the author's company.

While it can be pleasurable to move speedily through a work of fiction, there's a different sort of pleasure to be had in lingering, backtracking, rereading the same page.

The test of literature is, I suppose, whether we ourselves live more intensely for the reading of it.

If one cannot enjoy reading a book over and over again, there is no use in reading it at all.

Of course there is no denying the possible pleasure of holing up with a fat, slow-moving, mediocre novel; still, we all know that we can indulge ourselves in that fashion only so much. In the end, we read not for reading's sake, but to learn.

One of the great rewards of a writer's life is that it lets you read all the books you want to without feeling guilty.

I read the novel 'Miracle at St. Anna' when it was first released, and I loved it.

I think I write in order to discover on my shelf a new book that I would enjoy reading, or to see a new play that would engross me.

The only thing worse than not reading a book in the last ninety days is not reading a book in the last ninety days and thinking that it doesn't matter

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

Growing maturity is marked by the increasing liberties we take with our travelling... we made the discovery (some people never make it) that real books can be taken on a journey and that hours of golden reading can so be added to its other delights.

[Books] may sleep for a while and be neglected; but whenever the desire of information springs up in the human breast, there they are with mild wisdom ready to instruct and please us.

... but as has been said, September read often, and liked it best when words did not pretend to be simple, but put on their full armor and rode out with colors flying.

If we expose kids to books and art, nothing but good can come from it.

Reading well is one of the greatest pleasures that solitude can afford you.

I wanted to see who this Yeats person was, and I said to my mother, 'I want a book by this person.' And she bought it for me, and a lot of it was over my head, but I had it.

If you were to loose the habit of making the effort to get the book and read the words one by one you would have lost something terribly important. So I think that we have a task to ensure that this doesn't happen.

I'm not a fast reader. I like to linger over each sentence, enjoying the style. If I don't enjoy the writing, I stop.