Coleridge. "Some readers are like the hour-glass. Their reading is as the sand; it runs in and runs out, but leaves not a vestige behind. Some, like a sponge, which imbibes everything, and returns it in the same state, only a little dirtier. Some, 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 away all that is worthless, preserves only the pure gems."
Collyer, Robert. "Do you want to know how I manage to talk to you in this simple Saxon? I will tell you. I read Bunyan, Crusoe, and Goldsmith when I was a boy, morning, noon, and night; all the rest was task work. These were my delight, with the stories in the Bible, and with Shakspeare, when at last the mighty master came within our doors. These were like a well of pure water; and this is the first step I seem to have taken of my own free will toward the pulpit. From the days when we used to spell out Crusoe and old Bunyan, there had grown up in me a devouring hunger to read books.... I could not go home for the Christmas of 1839, and was feeling very sad about it all, for I was only a boy; and sitting by the fire, an old farmer came in and said, 'I notice thou's fond o' reading, so I brought thee summat to read.' It was Irving's 'Sketch Book.' I had never heard of the work. I went at it, and was 'as them that dream.' No such delight had touched me since the old days of Crusoe."
Curtis, G. W. "Books are the ever-burning lamps of accumulated wisdom."
De Quincey. "Every one owes to the impassioned books he has read many a thousand more of emotions than he can consciously trace back to them.... A great scholar depends not simply on an infinite memory, but also on an infinite and electrical power of combination,—bringing together from the four winds, like the Angel of the Resurrection, what else were dust from dead men's bones into the unity of breathing life."
Diodorus. "Books are the medicine of the mind."
Emerson. "The profit of books is according to the sensibility of the reader."
Erasmus. "A little before you go to sleep read something that is exquisite and worth remembering, and contemplate upon it till you fall asleep; and when you awake in the morning call yourself to an account for it."
Farrar, Canon. "If all the books of the world were in a blaze, the first twelve which I should snatch out of the flames would be the Bible, the Imitation of Christ, Homer, Æschylus, Thucydides, Tacitus, Virgil, Marcus Aurelius, Dante, Shakspeare, Milton, Wordsworth. Of living writers I would save, first, the works of Tennyson, Browning, and Ruskin."
Fénelon. "If the crowns of all the kingdoms of the empire were laid down at my feet in exchange for my books and my love of reading, I would spurn them all."