W. Cowper. The Winter Walk at Noon.
Much reading is like much eating, wholly useless without digestion.—R. South.
If I had read as much as other men, I should have been as ignorant as they.—T. Hobbes.
READING AND ILLITERACY
You might read all the books in the British Museum (if you could live long enough) and remain an utterly 'illiterate', uneducated person; but ... if you read ten pages of a good book, letter by letter,—that is to say, with real accuracy,—you are for evermore in some measure an educated person.—J. Ruskin. Sesame and Lilies.
READING AS INTELLECTUAL INDOLENCE
Do I boast of my omnivorousness of reading, even apart from romances? Certainly no!—never, except in joke. It's against my theories and ratiocinations, which take upon themselves to assert that we all generally err by reading too much, or out of proportion to what we think. I should be wiser, I am persuaded, if I had not read half as much—should have had stronger and better exercised faculties. The fact is, that the ne plus ultra of intellectual indolence is this reading of books. It comes next to what the Americans call 'whittling'.—E. B. Browning (Letter to R. H. Horne).
BOOKS AND MEN
He that sets out on the journey of life, with a profound knowledge of books, but a shallow knowledge of men, with much sense of others, but little of his own, will find himself as completely at a loss on occasions of common and of constant recurrence, as a Dutchman without his pipe, a Frenchman without his mistress, an Italian without his fiddle, or an Englishman without his umbrella.—C. C. Colton. Lacon.
Study is like the heaven's glorious sun,
That will not be deep-searched with saucy looks;
Small have continual plodders ever won,
Save base authority from others' books.