A truly great book should be read in youth, again in maturity and once more in old age, as a fine building should be seen by morning light, at noon and by moonlight.

if you read old books, you get to add all the years the author lived onto your own life.

One glance at a book and you hear the voice of another person, perhaps someone dead for 1,000 years. To read is to voyage through time.

If I have not read a book before, it is, to all intents and purposes, new to me, whether it was printed yesterday or three hundred years ago.

If I have not read a book before, it is, for all intents and purposes, new to me whether it was printed yesterday or three hundred years ago.

Age appears best in four things: old wood to burn, old wine to drink, old friends to trust and old authors to read.

Clearly one must read every good book at least once every ten years.

What we read with pleasure we read again with pleasure.

If time is precious, no book that will not improve by repeated readings deserves to be read at all.

If a book told you something when you were fifteen, it will tell you it again when you're fifty, though you may understand it so differently that it seems you're reading a whole new book.

Don Quixote — I read that every year, as some do the Bible.

Some books are so familiar that reading them is like being home again.

A book is a gift you can open again and again.

A good book is never exhausted. It goes on whispering to you from the wall.