I have never heard of one extraordinary leader who was not a good reader. From the world of politics - Abraham Lincoln was a self-educated and a self-confessed avid reader, Mahatma Gandhi and Nelson Mandela being good readers themselves encouraged others to improve themselves educationally, to the world of business - leaders like Jack Welch, Bill gates, have all been voracious readers, not to mention outstanding leaders, too. Following is a collection of quotes pertaining to the habit of reading:

 

• "For me, books have been a life-long resource--to learning, laughter, solace, excitement, inspiration. At your library, the world awaits you, free for the asking." — Lady Bird Johnson

 

• "Of all the diversions of life, there is none so proper to fill up its empty spaces as the reading of useful and entertaining authors." —Joseph Addison (1672-1719)

 

• "To feel most beautifully alive means to be reading something beautiful, ready always to apprehend in the flow of language the sudden flash of poetry." — Gaston Bachelard

 

• "Some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few are to be chewed and digested." — Francis Bacon (1561-1626)

 

• "The world may be full of fourth-rate writers but it's also full of fourth-rate readers." — Stan Barstow

 

• "A conventional good read is usually a bad read, a relaxing bath in what we know already. A true good read is surely an act of innovative creation in which we, the readers, become conspirators." —Malcolm Bradbury (b.1932)

 

• "There are worse crimes than burning books. One of them is not reading them." —Joseph Brodsky

 

• "To read without reflecting is like eating without digesting."—Edmund Burke

 

• "Our high respect for a well read person is praise enough for literature." —Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882)

 

• "Read in order to live." —Gustave Flaubert (1821-1880)

 

• "The greatest gift is the passion for reading. It is cheap, it consoles, it distracts, it excites, it gives you knowledge of the world and experience of a wide kind. It is a moral illumination." —Elizabeth Hardwick (b.1916)

 

• "The time to read is any time: no apparatus, no appointment of time and place, is necessary. It is the only art which can be practised at any hour of the day or night, whenever the time and inclination comes, that is your time for reading; in joy or sorrow, health or illness."—Holbrook Jackson (1874-1948)

 

• "For one who reads, there is no limit to the number of lives that may be lived, for fiction, biography and history offer an inexhaustible number of lives in many parts of the world, in all periods of time."—Louis L'amour (1908-1988)

 

• "The book to read is not the one which thinks for you, but the one which makes you think." —James McCosh

 

• "No entertainment is so cheap as reading, nor any pleasure so lasting."—Lady Mary Wortley Montagu (1689-1762)

 

• "Reading makes immigrants of us all. It takes us away from home, but more important, it finds homes for us everywhere."

—Hazel Rochman

 

• "We shouldn't teach great books; we should teach a love of reading." —B.F. Skinner (1904-1990)

 

• "Employ your time in improving yourself by other men's writing so that you shall come easily by what others have labored hard for." —Socrates (469-399 BC)

 

• "Read the best books first, or you may not have a chance to read them at all." —Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862)

 

• "No matter how busy you may think you are, you must find time for reading, or surrender yourself to self-chosen ignorance." —Atwood H. Townsend

 

• "Books are not made for furniture, but there is nothing else that so beautifully furnishes a house." —Henry Ward Beecher

 

• "If we encounter a man of rare intellect, we should ask him what books he reads."—Ralph Waldo Emerson

 

• "Let us read with method, and propose to ourselves an end to which our studies may point. The use of reading is to aid us in thinking."—Edward Gibbon

 

• "When I get a little money I buy books; and if any is left I buy food and clothes."—Erasmus

 

• "Make the most of yourself...for that is all there is of you." —Ralph Waldo Emerson

 

• "Except a living man, there is nothing more wonderful than a book." — Charles Kingsley

 

• "To acquire the habit of reading is to construct for yourself a refuge from almost all of the miseries of life." — W. Somerset Maugham

 

• "I have often reflected upon the new vistas that reading opened to me.  I knew right there in prison that reading had changed forever the course of my life.  As I see it today, the ability to read awoke in me some long dormant craving to be mentally alive."— Malcolm X

 

• "In a very real sense, people who have read good literature have lived more than people who cannot or will not read." — S. I. Hayakawa

 

 

• "The more you read, the more things you will know. The more that you learn, the more places you'll go." — Dr. Seuss

 

• "Some people will lie, cheat, steal and back-stab to get ahead... and to think, all they have to do is READ." — Anonymous