Master those books you have. Read them thoroughly. Bathe in them until they saturate you. Read and reread them, masticate and digest them. Let them go into your very self. Peruse a good book several times and make notes and analyses of it. A student will find that his mental constitution is more affected by one book thoroughly mastered than by twenty books he has merely skimmed. Little learning and much pride comes of hasty reading. Some men are disabled from thinking by putting their meditation away for the sake of much reading. In reading let your motto be “much, not many.”

- Charles Spurgeon, Encounter with Spurgeon by Helmut Thielecke, 197.

In case you might be wondering where all these John Newton quotes are coming from, I got them out of The Letters of John Newton, which I read several years ago, greatly enjoyed, and highly recommend.

These are not books, lumps of lifeless paper, but minds alive on the shelves.

- Gilbert Highet

If writers were good businessmen, they’d have too much sense to be writers.

- Irwin S. Cobb

Some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested.

- Francis Bacon

I have lost all sense of home, having moved about so much. It means to me now - only that place where the books are kept.

- John Steinbeck

To read without reflecting is like eating without digesting.

- Edmund Burke

A library is thought in cold storage.

- Herbert Samuel

Books are the bees which carry the quickening pollen from one to another mind.

- James Russell Lowell