Henry David Thoreau Quotes

Read not to contradict and confute; nor to believe and take for granted; nor to find talk and discourse; but to weigh and consider. Some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested: that is, some books are to be read only in parts, others to be read, but not curiously, and some few to be read wholly, and with diligence and attention.

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

I think that good writing is based on good reading. Maybe it's not about writing today, maybe it's about reading today. Maybe it's about finding the sort of book you would never read.

Books must be read as deliberately and reservedly as they were written.

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

I recommend the art of slow reading.

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

To be well informed, one must read quickly a great number of merely instructive books. To be cultivated, one must read slowly and with a lingering appreciation the comparatively few books that have been written by men who lived, thought, and felt with style.

It is not the reading of many books which is necessary to make a man wise or good; but well reading of a few.

In the past few years I've assigned books to be read before a student attends one of my weeklong seminars. I have been astonished by how few people -- people who supposedly want to write -- read books, and if they read them, how little they examine them.

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.

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

We are now in want of an art to teach how books are to be read rather than to read them. Such an art is practicable.

It's different to read a book for pleasure than to read it analytically. In the past, I'd read Pride and Prejudice for pleasure. This time, I was really looking at the structure, the order of events, how the characters interact with each other and how the book is paced.

No book can be appreciated until it has been slept with and dreamed over.

He objected, though, to indiscriminate reading. 'One must have some question,' he wrote, 'addressed to the book one is going to read.

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.

Curiously enough, one cannot read a book; one can only reread it. A good reader, a major reader, and active and creative reader is a rereader.

You have to be an extremely good reader to appreciate what a good writer is. There are some people who are completely insensitive to good writing.

Read like mad. But try to do it analytically - which can be hard, because the better and more compelling a novel is, the less conscious you will be of its devices. It's worth trying to figure those devices out, however: they might come in useful in your own work.

Confusing the author and the character seems to be a popular and rather unsophisticated reaction to books.

We are never allowed to forget that some books are badly written; we should remember that sometimes they're badly read, too.

Reading without purpose is sauntering not exercise.

It is no more expected of most producers to read a book than it is, say, of Ted Williams to dust off home plate.

You can't expect that, after a poor fellow has written a book, he should also understand it.