Little learning and much pride come of hasty reading.
Master those books you have. Read them thoroughly. Bathe in them until they saturate you. Read and reread them…digest them. Let them go into your very self. Peruse a good book several times and make notes and analyses of it. A student will find that his mental constitution is more affected by one book thoroughly mastered than by twenty books he has merely skimmed. Little learning and much pride comes from hasty reading. Some men are disabled from thinking by their putting meditation away for the sake of much reading. In reading let your motto be ‘much not many.
I read hard, or not at all; never skimming, never turning aside to merely inciting books; and Plato, Aristotle, Butler, Thucydides, Sterne, Jonathan Edwards, have passed like the iron atoms of the blood into my mental constitution.
Master those books you have. Read them thoroughly. Bathe in them until they saturate you. Read and re-read them...digest them...a student will find that his mental constitution is more affected by one book thoroughly mastered than by 20 books he has merely skimmed.
Never write on a subject without first having read yourself full on it; and never read on a subject till you have thought yourself hungry on it.
It is better to read a little and thoroughly than cram a crude undigested mass into my head, though it be great in quantity.
For some years now I have read through the Bible twice every year. If you picture the Bible to be a mighty tree and every word a little branch, I have shaken every one of these branches because I wanted to know what it was and what it meant.
If you don't feel that you haven't read enough, you haven't read enough.
I devoured Gibbon. I rode triumphantly through it from end to end and enjoyed it all.
What I read, I read thoroughly and retain almost all of it.
Reading aloud means no skipping, no skimming, no cutting to the chase.
