Quotes & Sayings About Reading Minds

Slaveowners in America were torturing the Africans they enslaved for reading, but the British had discovered the hard way of truth of the maxim - Nature abhors a vacuum. Fill their minds with your stories and they will adore you; leave their minds free to roam and they will hatch plans to destroy you" (181). — Elizabeth Nunez

These are not books, lumps of lifeless paper, but minds alive on the shelves. From each of them goes out its own voice ... and just as the touch of a button on our set will fill the room with music, so by taking down one of these volumes and opening it, one can call into range the voice of a man far distant in time and space, and hear him speaking to us, mind to mind, heart to heart. — Gilbert Highet

There in the mountains, close to the delights of Nature, everything you see and hear is a joy. It is a joy unspoiled by any real discomfort. Your legs may possibly ache, or you may feel the lack of something really good to eat, but that is all. I wonder why this should be? I suppose the reason is that, looking at the landscape, it is as though you were looking at a picture unrolled before you, or reading a poem on a scroll. The whole area is yours [...]. You are free from any care or worry because you accept the fact that this scenery will help neither to fill your belly, nor add a penny to your salary, and are content to enjoy it just as scenery. This is the great charm of Nature, that it can in an instant discipline men's hearts and minds, and removing all that is base, lead them into the pure unsullied world of poetry. — Soseki Natsume

Do you know why people are reading more books now than ever before? Because the terrific catastrophe of the war has made them realize that their minds are ill. The world was suffering from all sorts of mental fevers and aches and disorders, and never knew it. Now our mental pangs are only too manifest. We are all reading, hungrily, hastily, trying to find out - after the trouble is over - what was the matter with our minds. — Christopher Morley

Now, 75 years [after To Kill a Mockingbird], in an abundant society where people have laptops, cell phones, iPods, and minds like empty rooms, I still plod along with books.
[Open Letter, O Magazine, July 2006] — Harper Lee

Dylan prided himself in the gift of reading women's minds. They were such fickle little creatures, as apt to change their minds as their thongs. — Cat Byrd

Books have immortalized great minds. Books have kept ancients secrets alive. A world which least value books, least value the real essence of wisdom and least know how to preserve what is precious! — Ernest Agyemang Yeboah

It was Sci-Fi and fantasy that got me reading, and Sci-Fi writers in particular have pack rat minds. They introduce all sorts of interesting themes and ideas into their books, and so for me it was a short leap to go from the fantasy and Sci-Fi genres to folklore, mythology, ancient history and philosophy. I did not read philosophy because I set out to become a philosopher; I read it because it looked interesting. — Terry Pratchett

This consists in not taking a book into one's hand merely because it is interesting the great public at the time - such as political or religious pamphlets, novels, poetry, and the like, which make a noise and reach perhaps several editions in their first and last years of existence. Remember rather that the man who writes for fools always finds a large public: and only read for a limited and definite time exclusively the works of great minds, those who surpass other men of all times and countries, and whom the voice of fame points to as such. These alone really educate and instruct.

One can never read too little of bad, or too much of good books: bad books are intellectual poison; they destroy the mind — Arthur Schopenhauer

The poet speaks to you about the day, and about this very day that is flying. Is there, then, any doubt that for hapless mortals, that is, for men who are engrossed, the fairest day is ever the first to flee? Old age surprises them while their minds are still childish, and they come to it unprepared and unarmed, for they have made no provision for it; they have stumbled upon it suddenly and unexpectedly, they did not notice that it was drawing nearer day by day. Even as conversation or reading or deep meditation on some subject beguiles the traveller, and he finds that he has reached the end of his journey before he was aware that he was approaching it, just so with this unceasing and most swift journey of life, which we make at the same pace whether waking or sleeping; those who are engrossed become aware of it only at the end. — Seneca.

The effect of reading literary non-fiction that matters most to me is when the coin drops, and this happens in the company of the great, mercuric, encyclopedic minds: Empson, Kenneth Burke, Northrop Frye. — Paul Fry

Children read to learn - even when they are reading fantasy, nonsense, light verse, comics or the copy on cereal packets, they are expanding their minds all the time, enlarging their vocabulary, making discoveries - it is all new to them. — Joan Aiken

But I think it's useful to note that at any particular point in our lives our minds are full not just of our own memories but of the experiences of characters from the books we've been reading. That's if we are lucky to have the education and leisure to read at all. And the curiosity — Joanna Scott

God, the bitter misery that reading works into this world! Everybody knows that - everbody who IS everybody. All the best minds have been off reading for years. Look at the swing La Rouchefoucauld took at it. He said that if nobody had ever learned to read, very few people would be in love. Good for you, La Rouchefoucauld; nice going, boy. I wish I'd never learned to read. — Dorothy Parker

In her minds eye she sat there, in the domesticated golden sunlight on the velvet sofa, lapped around by carpets and books and mahogany, solitary and content, as if, in fact, cloistered. — Jane Smiley

There's only about about 6 to 8 inches between an open book and a human being's heart. A lot can happen in those 7 inches. Perspectives, fresh perspectives occur and minds expand, and I love fiction and I feel like it's a possibility for transformation. — Aline Ohanesian

People are often wary of reading or watching anything in the horror genre because in their minds, it's just senseless gore, death and violence. Well, I can tell you from avid experience, that's not what horror is about. The horror genre teaches us that sometimes really bad things happen to really good people, but that hope always prevails in even the darkest of situations. That's a very important lesson, no matter how frightening you think the teacher is, and to be in the top of her class, all you need to do is to go in with an open mind. — Rebecca McNutt

In Berkeley and San Francisco, the revolution didn't seem to far away. A lot of white radicals, hippies, Chicanos, Blacks, and Asians were ready to get down. But i hadn't forgotten the hard hats and the red necks and the bible belt and the so called middle amerikans who had elected Nixon. I couldn't imagine how the "new left" was talking to those people, much less organizing and changing their minds. I decided the only way i would come up with answers was to on keep studying and struggling. I didn't know how half of what i was studying would fit in but i figured it would all come in handy some day. I read about guerrilla warfare and clandestine struggle without having the faintest idea that one day i would go underground. It's kind of funny when i think about it because reading that stuff had probably saved my life a million times. — Assata Shakur

All we have to do when reading Bleak House is to relax and let our
spines take over. Although we read with our minds, the seat of
artistic delight is between the shoulder blades. That little shiver
behind is quite certainly the highest form of emotion that humanity
has attained when evolving pure art and pure science. Let us worship
the spine and its tingle. — Vladimir Nabokov

Three hundred years from now children will be learning about a lost art that has the ability to:

Enrich minds,
Increase intelligence,
Reduce stress
Increase knowledge
Increase concentration

IT'S CALLED READING — Steven Aitchison

Bookworms are the most precious worms in the world when they are humans, feeding upon the paper's body with their starving minds. — Munia Khan

Weak minds may be injured by novel-reading; but sensible people find both amusement and instruction therein. — Henry Ward Beecher

Reading gives us the furniture of our minds. Reading can spell the difference between independence and slavery; liberation and isolation. Without reading, our history would have turned out differently. Reading made and shaped our heroes. Reading liberates. — Ambeth R. Ocampo

Reading good books is like engaging in conversation with the most cultivated minds of past centuries who had composed them, or rather, taking part in a well-conducted dialogue in which such minds reveal to us only the best of their thoughts. — Rene Descartes

Also, I've spent an entire week without reading any books or talking about them too loudly. I'm learning to work my apparat's screen, the colourful pulsating mosaic of it, the fact that it knows every last stinking detail about the world, whereas my books only know the minds of their authors. — Gary Shteyngart

Reading well, which means reading actively, is thus not only a good in itself, nor is it merely a means to advancement in our work or career. It also serves to keep our minds alive and growing. — Mortimer J. Adler

Look- here's a table covered with red cloth. On it is a cage the size of a small fish aquarium. In the cage is a white rabbit with a pink nose and pink-rimmed eyes. [ ... ] On its back, clearly marked in blue ink, is the numeral 8. [ ... ] The most interesting thing here isn't even the carrot-munching rabbit in the cage, but the number on its back. Not a six, not a four, not nineteen-point-five. It's an eight. This is what we're looking at, and we all see it. I didn't tell you. You didn't ask me. I never opened my mouth and you never opened yours. We're not even in the same year together, let alone the same room ... except we are together. We are close. We're having a meeting of the minds. [ ... ] We've engaged in an act of telepathy. No mythy-mountain shit; real telepathy. — Stephen King

You write out of experience, and a large part of that experience is the life of the spirit; reading is the liberation into the minds of others. — Penelope Lively

Take space. It has to be either finite or infinite, yet neither possibility sits well with our intuitions. When I try to imagine a finite universe, I get Marcel Marceau miming on an invisible wall with his hands. Or, after reading about manifolds in books on physics, I see ants creeping over a sphere, or people trapped in a huge inner tube unaware of all the exposure around them. But in all these cases the volume is stubbornly suspended in a larger space, which shouldn't be there at all, but which my minds eye can't help but peek at. — Steven Pinker

I stress the expansion and elaboration of language. In simplifying it, reducing it, we reduce the power of our expression and our power to communicate. Standardization, the use of worn-out formulas, impedes communication because it does not match the subtlety of our minds or emotions, the multimedia of our unconscious life. — Anais Nin

I am convinced there are genuine and valid levels of perception available with cannabis (and probably with other drugs) which are, through the defects of our society and our educational system, unavailable to us without such drugs. Such a remark applies not only to self-awareness and to intellectual pursuits, but also to perceptions of real people, a vastly enhanced sensitivity to facial expression, intonations, and choice of words which sometimes yields a rapport so close it's as if two people are reading each other's minds. — Carl Sagan

What my research has brought me to believe is this," Katherine said. "God is very real - a mental energy that pervades everything. And we, as human beings, have been created in that image - " "I'm sorry?" Langdon interrupted. "Created in the image of ... mental energy?" "Exactly. Our physical bodies have evolved over the ages, but it was our minds that were created in the image of God. We've been reading the Bible too literally. We learn that God created us in his image, but it's not our physical bodies that resemble God, it's our minds. — Dan Brown

The truth, I am convinced, is that there is no longer a poetical audience among the higher class of minds, that moral, political, and physical science have entirely withdrawn from poetry the attention of all whose attention is worth having; and that the poetical reading public being composed of the mere dregs of the intellectual community, the most sufficing passport to their favour must rest on the mixture of a little easily-intelligible portion of mawkish sentiment with an absolute negation of reason and knowledge. — Thomas Love Peacock

The detective story is the normal recreation of noble minds. — Philip Guedalla

There are lots of superheroes with different superpowers, and some of them are big and flashy, like super strength and super speed, and molecular restructuring, and force fields. But these abilities are really not so different from the superpower stuff that old Jiko could do, like moving superslow, or reading people's minds, or appearing in doorways, or making people feel okay about themselves by just being there. — Ruth Ozeki

Every time a written word is put to page it is the opportunity to expand our minds, whether we are the writer or the reader. Enjoy the journey wherever it may take you! — K. Lamb

In reading The History of Nations, we find that, like individuals, they have their whims and their peculiarities, their seasons of excitement and recklessness, when they care not what they do. We find that whole communities suddenly fix their minds upon one object and go mad in its pursuit; that millions of people become simultaneously impressed with one delusion, and run after it, till their attention is caught by some new folly more captivating than the first. — Charles Mackay

Reading will put you into the minds and hearts of others. It might help you understand why other people do what they do sometimes. — Scott Simon

Here, in short, is the great danger of reading most novels, romances, and works of fiction. The greater part of them give a false or incorrect view of human nature. They paint their model men and women as they ought to be, and not as they really are. The readers of such writings get their minds filled with wrong conceptions of what the world is. Their notions of mankind become visionary and unreal. They are constantly looking for men and women such as they never meet, and expecting what they never find. — J.C. Ryle

They are a brilliant device for shape-shifting as we can slip into the skin of authors from other times, other cultural backgrounds, brilliant minds who give us a new perspective on life and the world - something we all need from time to time. - Cornelia Funke — Jen Campbell

By reading, we will know the minds of great soul. — Lailah Gifty Akita

If minds are truly alive they will seek out books, for books are the human race recounting its memorable experiences, confronting its problems, searching for solutions, drawing the blueprints of it futures. — Harry Allen Overstreet

These religious types were the fans that Jesus seems to have the most trouble with. Fans who will walk into a restaurant and bow their heads to pray before a meal just in case someone is watching. Fans who won't go to R-rated movies at the theater, but have a number of them saved on their DVR at home. Fans who may feed the hungry and help the needy, and then they make sure they work it into every conversation for the next two weeks. Fans who make sure people see them put in their offering at church, but they haven't considered reaching out to their neighbor who lost a job and can't pay the bills. Fans who like seeing other people fail because in their minds it makes them look better. Fans whose primary concern in raising their children is what other people think. Fans who are reading this and assuming I'm describing someone else. Fans who have worn the mask for so long they have fooled even themselves. — Kyle Idleman

At some point in reading, we realize we have to read not just the books that we'd enjoy, but the books that move us, touch us, those that break us and hurt us, those which remind us that we will always be the ignorant of this life. We have to read the books that make us so little, make us a speck of dust or a grain of sand in a galaxy, until we feed our minds with all the knowledge we need, which is infinite in itself. — Nema Al-Araby

Until then I had thought each book spoke of the things, human or divine, that lie outside books. Now I realized that not infrequently books speak of books: it is as if they spoke among themselves. In the light of this reflection, the library seemed all the more disturbing to me. It was then the place of a long, centuries-old murmuring, an imperceptible dialogue between one parchment and another, a living thing, a receptacle of powers not to be ruled by a human mind, a treasure of secrets emanated by many minds, surviving the death of those who had produced them or had been their conveyors. — Umberto Eco

Almost I feel the pulsebeat of the ages,
Now swift, now slow, beneath my fingertips.
The heartthrobs of the prophets and the sages
Beat through these bindings; and my quick hand slips
Old books from dusty shelves, in eager seeking
For truths the flaming tongues of the ancients tell;
For the words of wisdom that they still are speaking
As clearly as an echoing silver bell.
Here is the melody that lies forever
At the deep heart of living; here we keep
The accurate recorded discs that never
Can be quite silenced, though their makers sleep
The still deep sleep, so long as a seeker finds
The indelible imprint of their moving minds. — Grace Noll Crowell

Higher intelligence is not necessarily something you're born with or genetically predisposed toward. In fact, most instances of above-the-ordinary intelligences are usually acquired thru superior learning techniques ... Reading about the greatest minds in history, including recent history, more often than not reveals the individuals concerned (or people close to them) employed specific learning methods. — James Morcan

Let it be a settled principle in our minds, in reading the Bible, that Christ is the central sun of the whole book. So long as we keep Him in view, we shall never greatly err in our search for spiritual knowledge. Once losing sight of Christ, we shall find the whole Bible dark and full of difficulty. — J.C. Ryle

Every man waits his destined hour; even the cities are doomed to their fate. Let us spend our leisure with our books, which will take our minds off these troubles, and will teach us to despise what many people desire....sometimes I am free for reading, free from all care about public affairs...I live free as much as I can

-Freedom here has nothing to do with political libertyir a notion of rights or the licence to say whatever [Poggio] wished or the ability to go wherever [Poggio] chose. It is rather the experience of withdrawing inwardly from the press of the world - and ensphering himself in a space apart. — Poggio Bracciolini

Even though poetry was written for the 'minds ear' as well as the physical ear, the minds ear can be trained only by the other ... which comes back to reading poetry aloud ... — Yvor Winters

Literature is map of humanity, the documenter of civilization. Books introduce us to the landscape of the greatest minds of every century. — Kilroy J. Oldster

I am grateful for emphasis on reading the scriptures. I hope that for you this will become something far more enjoyable than a duty; that, rather, it will become a love affair with the word of God. I promise you that as you read, your minds will be enlightened and your spirits will be lifted. At first it may seem tedious, but that will change into a wondrous experience with thoughts and words of things divine. Gordon B. Hinckley — Gordon B. Hinckley

Reading is poor man's way of travelling not just around the world but into the minds of people. — Anonymous

As the outward man is not fit for work for any length of time unless he eats, so is with the inner man. What is the food for the inner man? Not prayer, but the Word of God-not the simple reading of the Word of God, so that it only passes through our minds, just as water runs through a pipe. No, we must consider what we read, ponder over it, and apply it to our hearts. — George Muller

The book-worm wraps himself up in his web of verbal generalities, and sees only the glimmering shadows of things reflected from the minds of others. — William Hazlitt

Indeed the general natural Tendency of Reading good History, must be, to fix in the Minds of Youth deep Impressions of the Beauty and Usefulness of Virtue of all Kinds, Publick Spirit, Fortitude. — Benjamin Franklin

Literature is a way in which we can learn to live deeper lives
husband with wife, parent with child, brother with sister, fellow member with fellow member. Most good authors are better than we are. They are much better company than our own friends.
What comes from good company? What comes from good company is better manners, greater sensitivity, greater sensibility, greater empathy, great sympathy. Reading good literature makes us more capable of understanding other people, of loving other people, those whom we don't particularly want to love, even our enemies, as well as those closest to us. How can we expect to have full marriages when we are not going into those marriages with full minds and fine sensibilities? We are ignoring the tremendous possibilities of a delicate, well-poised, rich, sensitive life if we ignore the literature of the past. There is no substitute. — Arthur Henry King

No ... it never takes your breath away, telling you things you already know, laying everything out flat, as though the terms and the time, and the nature and the movement of everything were secrets of the same magnitude. They write for people who read with the surface of their minds, people with reading habits that make the smallest demands of them, people brought up reading for facts, who know what's going to come next and want to know what's coming next, and get angry at surprises. Clarity's essential, and detail, no fake mysticism, the facts are bad enough. But we're embarrassed for people who tell too much, and tell it without surprise. How does he know what happened, unless it's one unshaven man alone in a boat, changing I to he, and how often do you get a man alone in a boat, in all this ... all this ... — William Gaddis

I easily sink into mere absorption of what other minds have done, and should like a whole life for that alone. — George Eliot

But it's well known that reading makes people impudent, and tomorrow's world is going to need some people who aren't shy to speak their minds, don't you think? — Nina George

A careful reading of the Old and New Testaments shows that idolatry is nothing like the crude picture that springs to mind of a sculpture in some distant country. The idea is highly sophisticated, drawing together the complexities of motivation in individual psychology, the social environment, and also the unseen world. Idols are not just on pagan altars, but in well-educated human hearts and minds — Richard Keyes

I'd forgotten that human minds are easy to shatter as eggshells," Rhysand said, and ran a finger across the base of my throat. I shuddered, my eyes burning. "Look at how delighful she is - look how she's trying not to cry out in terror. It would be quick, I promise. — Sarah J. Maas

Someone has said of books that they are our 'amplest heritages' of thought, and so they are. That doesn't necessarily mean that they must be learned or profound. They are food for the mind and different minds require different foods ; everyone is better for variety. Whatever stimulates the mind feeds it, be it fact, fiction or fable. That is where our responsibility lies ; in knowing what builds good mental blood and brawn, and in dispensing that only. Don't ever let yourself think you haven't time to read. — Mary Virginia Provines

Open books, not legs; blow minds, not guys. — Trish Jackson

Why do you think people stopped reading? We read to connect with other minds. But why read when you're busy writing, describing the fine-grained flotsam of your own life. Compulsively recording every morsel you eat, that you're cold, or, I don't know, heartbroken by a football game. An endless stream flowing to an audience of everyone and no one. — Alena Graedon

By reading the writings of the most interesting minds in history, we meditate with our own minds and theirs as well. This is to me is a miracle. — Kurt Vonnegut

If I had the opportunity to say a fine word to all the young people of America, it would be this: Don't think too much about yourselves. Try to cultivate the habit of thinking of others; this will reward you. Nourish your minds by good reading, constant reading. Discover what your lifework is, work in which you can do most good, in which you can be happiest. Be unafraid in all things when you know you are in the right. — Charles William Eliot

Since we are destined to live out our lives in the prison of our minds, it is our duty to furnish it well. — Peter Ustinov

No. He says when you're dealing with any kids of supernatural beings, Gods and Devils and angels, you tend to think about them like hurricanes or earthquakes, some kind of mindless force of nature. But if they're real, then they have minds. They know your name. So even reading about the Devil tips him off, he knows instantly he's being read about and that you're somebody he may have to deal with. And I'm thinking what you did in Vegas went way, way beyond that."
"What 'I' did? What about us? We were both there."
"Yeah but I cut my hair since then. They probably think that was a different guy. — David Wong

Why are we reading, if not in hope of beauty laid bare, life heightened and its deepest mystery probed? Can the writer isolate and vivify all in experience that most deeply engages our intellects and our hearts? Can the writer renew our hope for literary forms? Why are we reading if not in hope that the writer will magnify and dramatize our days, will illuminate and inspire us with wisdom, courage, and the possibility of meaningfulness, and will press upon our minds the deepest mysteries, so that we may feel again their majesty and power? What do we ever know that is higher than that power which, from time to time, seizes our lives, and reveals us startlingly to ourselves as creatures set down here bewildered? Why does death so catch us by surprise, and why love? We still and always want waking. — Annie Dillard

Reading mysteries: the recreation of intelligent minds. — Donna Andrews

A program of active reading and writing might be the hardest form of thinking, but it is also the most organized methodology of self-education. Reading exposes the mind to a world of ideas heretofore unimaginable and encourages the novice learner to write. Reading is a form a joint mediation and writing represents the product of several authors' collective and collaborative minds at work. — Kilroy J. Oldster

He's stopped reading The Great Minds of Western Philosophy completely, and spend all his time programming, which really is his superpower. I mean, there are lots of superheroes with different superpowers, and some of them are big and flashy, like superstrength, and superspeed, and molecular restructuring, and force fields. But these abilities are really not so different from the superpower stuff that old Jiko could do, like moving superslow, or reading people's minds, or appearing in doorways, or making people feel okay about themselves just by being there. — Ruth Ozeki

Great lecturers seldom hesitate to use dramatic tricks to enshrine their precepts in the minds of their audiences, and at Yale perhaps Chauncey B. Tinker was the most noted. To read one of his lectures was like reading a monologue of the great actress Ruth Draper
you missed the main point. You missed the drop in his voice as he approached the death in Rome of the tubercular Keats; you missed the shaking tone in which he described the poet's agony for the absent Fanny with him his love had never been consummated; you missed the grim silence of the end. — Louis Auchincloss

Life is limited, but by writing, and reading, we can live in different worlds, get inside the skins and minds of other people, and, in this way, push out the boundaries of our own lifes. — Joan Lingard

The truth is I like having this connection with you. I like that you can call on me for help without either of us realizing it. I like that we have each other's backs - whether it's reading the minds of random girls of fighting off ruthless vampires. I like that we're a team. And I'd be an idiot to give that up. — Heather Brewer

Reading differently means shifting what we take into our minds because what we read affects how we think and how we feel about ourselves. — Debra Smouse

We may be sure that the characteristic blindness of the twentieth century - the blindness about which posterity will ask, "But how could they have thought that?" - lies where we have never suspected it ... None of us can fully escape this blindness, but we shall certainly increase it, and weaken our guard against it, if we read only modern books. Where they are true they will give us truths which we half knew already. Where they are false they will aggravate the error with which we are already dangerously ill. The only palliative is to keep the clean sea breeze of the centuries blowing through our minds, and this can be done only by reading old books. — C.S. Lewis

Our debt to tradition through reading and conversation is so massive, our protest so rare and insignificant-and this commonly on the ground of other reading and hearing-that in large sense, one would say there is no pure originality. All minds quote. Old and new make the warp and woof of every moment. There is no thread that is not a twist of these two strands. By necessity, by proclivity, and by delight, we all quote. It is as difficult to appropriate the thoughts of others as it is to invent. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

When my father first took me to Ennis Library I went down among the shelves and felt company, not only the company of writers, but the readers too, because they had lifted and opened and read these books. The books were worn in a way they can only get worn by hands and eyes and minds — Niall Williams

Okay. Oh-kay.
Re-cap. He just had a man come in his mouth. He liked it. He may be embarking on anal sex, soon, if he was reading the subtext right.
Options: stay or leave.
Pros of staying: first experience with anal sex.
Cons of staying: first experience with anal sex.
No, no. That isn't right.
Pros of staying: first experience with anal sex.
Cons of staying: not being able to face Pete the next day. Maybe ever.
The thing about sex, though, as Ryan is discovering, is that it's a goddamn persuasive motivator. It fucks with people's minds. — Dominique Frost

Nothing takes you out of yourself the way a good book does, but at the same time nothing makes you more aware of yourself as a solitary creature, possessing your own particular tastes, memories, associations, beliefs. Even as it fully engages you with another mind (or maybe many other minds, if you count the characters' as well as the author's), reading remains a highly individual act. No one will ever do it precisely the way you do. — Wendy Lesser

We tried some experiments in mind reading which were not very successful. Think mind reading contrary to common sense, wise provision of the Bon Dieu that we cannot read each others minds, twould stop civilization and everybody would take to the woods. In fifty or hundred thousand centuries when mankind have become perfect by evolution then perhaps this sense could be developed with safety to the state. — Thomas A. Edison

The newspaper articles that Joe had read about the upcoming Senate investigation into comic books always cited "escapism" among the litany of injurious consequences of their reading, and dwelled on the pernicious effect, on young minds, of satisfying the desire to escape. As if there could be any more noble or necessary service in life. — Michael Chabon

It is impossible to estimate full influence of the reading of the Word in a home day after day and year after year. It filters into the hearts of the young. It is absorbed into their souls. It colors all their thoughts. It is wrought into the very fiber of their minds. It imbues them with its own spirit. It's holy teachings become the principles of their lives, which rule their conduct and shape all their actions. — J.R. Miller

There is not enough Bible-reading among us. It is not sufficient to have the Book. We must actually READ it, and PRAY over it ourselves. It will do us no good, if it only lies still in our houses. We must be actually familiar with its contents, and have its texts stored in our memories and minds. Knowledge of the Bible never comes by intuition. It can only be obtained by diligent, regular, daily, attentive, wakeful reading. — J.C. Ryle

Now I will be anything else you please, except dull. You may say I have been dull already? As I am an honest woman, I don't agree with you. There are some people who bring dull minds to their reading - and them blame the writer for it. I say no more. — Wilkie Collins

You nourish your minds by reading books. There is no good in doing that unless you hold it also as a sacrifice to the whole world. For the whole world is one; you are rated a very insignificant part of it, and therefore it is right for you that you should serve your millions of brothers rather than aggrandise this little self — Swami Vivekananda

Books are those faithful mirrors that reflect to our mind the minds of sages and heroes. — Edward Gibbon

I have been interested in the 12th century since my 20s when it was very fashionable to say of anybody with whom you disagreed, which was basically anybody over the age of 30, "One of the great minds of the 12th century", and one day I thought, "I don't know anything about the 12 century." So I started buying books, reading about it, and I discovered it was a period of great flowering, it was a Renaissance before what we think is the Renaissance, the Italian Renaissance of the 16th century. — Yitzhak Rabin

But what sets me apart from other Chinese writers is that I neither copy the narrative techniques of foreign writers nor imitate their story lines; what I am happy to do is closely explore what is embedded in their work in order to understand their observations of life and comprehend how they view the world we live in. In my mind, by reading the works of others, a writer is actually engaging in a dialogue, maybe even a romance in which, if there is a meeting of the minds, a lifelong friendship is born; if not, an amicable parting is fine, too. — Mo Yan

I believe that reading and writing are the most nourishing forms of meditation anyone has so far found. By reading the writings of the most interesting minds in history, we meditate with our own minds and theirs as well. This to me is a miracle. — Kurt Vonnegut

When you assume you make a you-know-what out of U and me. Yep, so let's stop assuming so much. We are often quick to explain details to strangers, who we understand might not be reading our minds, but we often assume that those people closest to us, those who share our household such as spouses, children parents and siblings, can read our minds. And we get upset with them when they don't go figure.
I wonder how many angry words are directed not at an action or inaction as would at first appear, but simply at the fact that somebody did not read our minds.
So let's give those people we care most about the benefit of the doubt and do a little less assuming and a little more explaining. — David Leonhardt

And if you have any doubts," Peter added, "Corinithians overtly tells us that the parables have two layers of meaning: 'milk for babes and meat for men - where the milk is watered-down reading for infantile minds, and the meat is the true message, accessible only to mature minds. — Dan Brown

In reading, a lonely quiet concert is given to our minds; all our mental faculties will be present in this symphonic exaltation. — Stephane Mallarme

Few people ask from books what books can give us. Most commonly we come to books with blurred and divided minds, asking of fiction that it shall be true, of poetry that it shall be false, of biography that it shall be flattering, of history that it shall enforce our own prejudices. If we could banish all such preconceptions when we read, that would be an admirable beginning. — Virginia Woolf

I had read four thousand pages of letters by Lawrence and I wanted thousands of pages more... I wanted them not to end. And yet, at the same time that I was wishing they would not come to an end, I was hurrying through these books because however much you are enjoying a book, however much you want it never to end, you are always eager for it to end. However much you are enjoying a book you are always flicking to the end, counting to see how many pages are left, looking forward to the time when you can put the book down and have done with it. At the back of our minds, however much we are enjoying a book, we come to the end of it and some little voice is always saying, "Thank Christ for that! — Geoff Dyer

Through our reading we can travel to other times and other places, into other peoples minds and hearts and souls: it is a transcendent experience. — Louise DeSalvo

Reading develops cognitive skills. It trains our minds to think critically and to question what you are told. This is why dictators censor or ban books. It's why it was illegal to teach slaves to read. It's why girls in developing countries have acid thrown in their faces when they walk to school. — Karin Slaughter

In stories, when someone behaves uncharacteristically, we take it as a meaningful, even pivotal moment. If we are surprised again and again, we have to keep changing our minds, or give up and disbelieve the writer. In real life, if people think they know you well enough not only to say, 'It's Tuesday, Amy must be helping out at the library today,' but well enough to say to the librarian, after you've left the building, 'You know, Amy just loves reading to the four-year-olds, I think it's been such a comfort for her since her little boy died' - if they know you like that, you can do almost anything where they can't see you, and when they hear about it, they will, as we do, simply disbelieve the narrator. — Amy Bloom