1057 – “Laissez lire, et laissez danser; ces deux amusements ne feront jamais de mal au monde.”

“Let us read, and let us dance; these two amusements will never do any harm to the world.”

-Voltaire

663 – Will Durant on Living History

“It is a mistake to think that the past is dead. Nothing that has ever happened is quite without influence at this moment. The present is merely the past rolled up and concentrated in this second of time. You, too, are your past; often your face is your autobiography; you are what you are because of what you have been; because of your heredity stretching back into forgotten generations; because of every element of environment that has affected you, every man or woman that has met you, every book that you have read, every experience that you have had; all these are accumulated in your memory, your body, your character, your soul. So with a city, a country, and a race; it is its past, and cannot be understood without it.”

–Henry Steele Commager

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608 – “Books are the quietest and most constant of friends; they are the most accessible and wisest of counselors, and the most patient of teachers.”

–Charles W Eliot

604 – “To acquire the habit of reading is to construct for yourself a refuge from almost all the miseries of life.”

–William Somerset Maugham

594 – “Fascism is cured by reading, and racism is cured by traveling.”

–Miguel de Unamuno y Jugo [Attributed]

540 – “Reading gives us someplace to go when we have to stay where we are.”

–Mason Cooley [Attributed]

460 – “I love walking into a bookstore. It’s like all my friends are sitting on shelves, waving their pages at me.”

–Tahereh Mafi [Attributed]

449 – “A reader lives a thousand lives before he dies. The man who never reads lives only one.”

–Jojen Reed in George R R Martin’s A Dance with Dragons

412 – “I lived in books more than I lived anywhere else.”

–Neil Gaiman

411 – “A room without books is like a body without a soul.”

–Sir John Lubbock [He was paraphrasing a quote by Cicero, although this has been misattributed to Cicero extensively, See Source Notes for further information]