“ Scholarship requires persistence in study of matter that repels or even bores the student. You may be a devout believer and Herbert Spencer repellent. Nevertheless, if you are studying you may need to master Herbert Spencer. But if you are reading, read what interests you. If Scott does not interest you and Dickens does, drop Scott and read Dickens. You need not be any one’s enemy; but you need not be a friend with everybody. ”

“ He who reads for inspiration pursues a different course. If as he reads, a thought expressed by his author starts a train of thought in his own mind, he lays down his book and follows his thought wherever it may lead him. He endeavors to remember, not the thought which the author has recorded, but the unrecorded thought which the author has stimulated in his own mind. Reading is to him not an acquisition but a ferment. ”

“ The end of true reading is the development of individuality. Like a certain water insect, the reader instinctively selects from the outspread world of books the building materials for the house of his soul. He chooses here and rejects there, and remembers or forgets according to the formative desire of his nature. Yet it often happens that he forgets much that he needs to remember, and thus the question of methodical aids to memory arises.
One’s first thought, of course, is of the commonplace book. ”

“ No one but a publisher could call such reading “light.” Actually it is weariness to the flesh and heaviness to the spirit.
If, therefore, our idea of the best in books is the recreation they can so well bring; if we go to books as to a playground to forget our cares and to blow off the cobwebs of business, let us make sure that we find what we seek. It is there, sure enough. The playgrounds of literature are indeed wide, and alive with bracing excitement, nor is there any limit to the variety of the games. ”

“ Hackneyed as it is, there is no better general advice on reading than Shakespeare’s—
No profit is where is no pleasure taken,
In brief, sir, study what you most affect.
Not only in regard to books whose purpose, frankly, is recreation, but also in regard to the graver uses of books, this counsel no less holds. No reading does us any good that is not a pleasure to us. Her paths are paths of pleasantness. Yet, of course, this does not mean that all profitable reading is easy reading. Some of the books that give us the finest pleasure need the closest application for their enjoyment. ”

“ If it is clear that the purpose of reading is to put ourselves in communication with the best minds of our race, we need go no farther for a definition of “good reading.” Whatever human beings have said well is literature, whether it be the Declaration of Independence or a love story. Reading consists in nothing more than in taking one of the volumes in which somebody has said something well, opening it on one’s knee, and beginning. ”

“ Yes, we read too many books, and too many that, as they do not really interest us, bring us neither benefit nor diversion. Even from the point of view of reading for pleasure, we manage our reading badly. We listlessly allow ourselves to be bullied by publishers’ advertisements into reading the latest fatuity in fiction, without, in one case out of twenty, finding any of that pleasure we are ostensibly seeking. ”

“ It is true that no dead thing is equal to a living person. The one afternoon I spent in John G. Whittier’s home, the one dinner I took with Professor Tyndall in his London home, the one half hour which Herbert Spencer gave to me at his Club, mean more to me than any equal time spent in reading the writings of either one of them. These occasions of personal fellowship abide in the memory as long as life lasts. ”

“ If no one should write a book for a thousand years, there are quite enough books to keep us going. Real books there are in plenty. Perhaps there are more real books than there are real readers. Books are the strong tincture of experience. They are to be taken carefully, drop by drop, not carelessly gulped down by the bottleful. Therefore, if you would get the best out of books, spend a quarter of an hour in reading, and three-quarters of an hour in thinking over what you have read. ”

“ Most families can do with a few books that are tools. In these days in which there is a library in almost every village, the family that has an atlas, a dictionary, and a cyclopædia can look to the public library for such other tools as are necessary. And we can depend on the library or the book club for books that are mere acquaintances—the current book about current events, the books that are read to-day and forgotten to-morrow, leaving only a residuum in our memory, the book that, once read, we never expect to read again. ”

“ Wearied with his morning pursuit of truth through a maze of conflicting theories, he puts his tools by and goes to dinner. In the evening he sits down in the same library for an hour with his friends. He selects his friend according to his mood. Macaulay carries him back across the centuries and he lives for an hour with The Puritans or with Dr. Samuel Johnson. Carlyle carries him unharmed for an hour through the exciting scenes of the French Revolution; or he chuckles over the caustic humor of Thackeray’s semi-caricatures of English snobs. ”

“ We do not read Thackeray for ease; we read him for Thackeray and enjoy his ease by the way.
We must read a book for all there is in it or we shall get little or nothing. To be masters of books we must have learned to let books master us. This is true of books that we are required to read, such as text-books, and of those we read voluntarily and at leisure. The law of reading is to give a book its due and a little more. The art of reading is to know how to apply this law. For there is an art of reading, for each of us to learn for himself, a private way of making the acquaintance of books. ”

“ Some readers find the early morning, when they have all the world to themselves, their best time for reading, and, if you are a good sleeper, and do not find early rising more wearying than refreshing, there is certainly no other time of the day when the mind is so eagerly receptive, has so keen an edge of appetite, and absorbs a book in so fine an intoxication. ”

“ Grant was not a shining light in his school days, nor indeed in his life until the Civil War, and at first sight he is not a striking example of a great man influenced by books. Yet who can deny that the fruit of that early reading is to be found in his “Memoirs,” in which a man of action, unused to writing, and called upon to narrate great events, discovers an easy adequate style? There is a dangerous kind of conjecture in which many biographers indulge when they try to relate logically the scattered events of a man’s life. ”

“ If the expression of life in words is strong and beautiful and true it outlives empires, like the oldest books of the Old Testament. If it is weak or trivial or untrue, it is forgotten like most of the “stories” in yesterday’s newspaper, like most of the novels of last year. The expression of truth, the transmission of knowledge and emotions between man and man from generation to generation, these are the purposes of literature. Not to read books is like being shut up in a dungeon while life rushes by outside. ”

“ It is no little tug to leave one’s warm bed—but once we are out in the crystalline morning air, wasn’t it worth it? Perhaps our finest pleasure always demands some such austerity of preparation. That is the secret of the truest epicureanism. Books like Dante’s “Divine Comedy,” or Plato’s dialogues, will not give themselves to a lounging reader. They demand a braced, attentive spirit. But when the first effort has been made, how exhilarating are the altitudes in which we find ourselves; what a glow of pure joy is the reward which we are almost sure to win by our mental mountaineering. ”

“ Usually, of course, a book that is worth reading at all is worth reading carefully. Thoroughness of reading is the first thing to preach and to practise, and it is perhaps dangerous to suggest to a beginner that any book should be skimmed. The suggestion will serve its purpose if it indicates that there are ways to read, that practice in reading is like practice in anything else; the more one does, and the more intelligently one does it, the farther and more easily one can go. In the best reading—that is, the most thoughtful reading of the most thoughtful books—attention is necessary. ”

“ Actually, there is very little to read,—if we wish for real reading— and there is time to read it all twice over. We—Americans—bolt our books as we do our food, and so get far too little good out of them. We treat our mental digestions as brutally as we treat our stomachs. Meditation is the digestion of the mind, but we allow ourselves no time for meditation. We gorge our eyes with the printed page, but all too little of what we take in with our eyes ever reaches our minds or our spirits. ”

“ A wisely marked book is sometimes doubled in value by the marking.
Before I bring this essay to a close, already lengthened beyond my predetermined limits, I venture to add four rules which may be of value at least to the casual reader.
For reading, select the book which suits your inclination. In study it is wise to make your will command your mind and go on with your task however unattractive it may prove to you. You may be a Hamiltonian, and Jefferson’s views of the Constitution may repel you, or even bore you. ”

“ Instead, indeed, we are bored and enervated, where we might have been refreshed, either by romance or laughter. Such reading resembles the idle absorption of innocuous but interesting beverages, which cheer as little as they inebriate, and yet at the same time make frivolous demands on the digestive functions. ”

“ You will recall John Stuart Mill’s experience in reading Wordsworth. Mill was a man of letters as well as a scientific economist and philosopher, and we expect to find that men of letters have been nourished on literature; reading must necessarily have been a large part of their professional preparation. The examples of men of action who have been molded and inspired by books will perhaps be more helpful to remember; for most of us are not to be writers or to engage in purely intellectual work; our ambitions point to a thousand different careers in the world of action. ”

“ The young reader’s appetite is largely in his eyes, and it is very natural for one who is born with a taste for books to gather them about him at first indiscriminately, on the hearsay recommendation of fame, before he really knows what his own individual tastes are, or are going to be, and in that wistful survey I have imagined, our eyes will fall, too, with some amusement, on not a few volumes to which we never have had any really personal relation, and which, whatever their distinction or their value for others, were never meant for us. ”

“ The bookful blockhead, ignorantly read, With loads of learned lumber in his head
is a living argument against mere reading. But we can meet such argument by pointing out that the blockhead who cannot learn from books cannot learn much from life, either. That sometimes useful citizen whom it is fashionable to call a Philistine, and who calls himself a “practical man,” often has under him a beginner fresh from the schools, who is glib and confident in repeating bookish theories, but is not yet skillful in applying them. ”

“ Yet I myself and most of the booklovers whom I know have started at one time or another to pursue a course of reading, and we have never regretted our attempts. Why? Because this is an excellent way to discover the comparatively small number of authors who have a message that we need to hear. When such an one is discovered, one may with a good conscience let the systematic course go by the board until one has absorbed all that is useful from the store of good things offered by the valuable new acquaintance. ”

“ Many good books, including some most meritorious “three-decker” novels, have their profitless pages, and it is useful to know by a kind of practised instinct where to pause and reread and where to run lightly and rapidly over the page. It is a useful accomplishment not only in the reading of fiction, but in the business of life, to the man of affairs who must get the gist of a mass of written matter, and to the student of any special subject. ”

“ Moreover, the hard-headed skeptic, self-made and self-secure, who will not traffic with the literature that touches his life work, is seldom so confined to his own little shop that he will not, for recreation, take holiday tours into the literature of other men’s lives and labors. The man who does not like to read any books is, I am confident, seldom found, and at the risk of slandering a patriot, I will express the doubt whether he is a good citizen. ”

“ To these considerations in favor of such a home library as this, may be added the fact that the books are of such a size that one can easily put a volume in his pocket when he is going on a train or in a trolley car. For busy men and women often the only time for reading is the time which too many of us are apt to waste in doing nothing. ”