111 Reading Quotes: Largest Library With Amazing Collections

TABLE OF CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION

You know we love books around here. We also love discovering the inspiring things that have been said about books. We thought you might, too, which is why we’ve compiled a list of the 100 best quotes about reading.

Read on to see the many insightful, witty, and motivating things that have been said about reading by authors, poets, scientists, artists, visionaries and even comedians.

READING QUOTES VIDEO

BEST READING QUOTES

| “A reader lives a thousand lives before he dies . . . The man who never reads lives only one.” – George R.R. Martin

| “Until I feared I would lose it, I never loved to read. One does not love breathing.” – Harper Lee

| “Never trust anyone who has not brought a book with them.” – Lemony Snicket

| “You can never get a cup of tea large enough or a book long enough to suit me.” – C.S. Lewis

| “Reading is essential for those who seek to rise above the ordinary.” – Jim Rohn

| “The more that you read, the more things you will know. The more that you learn, the more places you’ll go.” – Dr. Seuss

| “I find television very educating. Every time somebody turns on the set, I go into the other room and read a book.” – Groucho Marx

| “Classic’ – a book which people praise and don’t read.” – Mark Twain

| “You don’t have to burn books to destroy a culture. Just get people to stop reading them.” – Ray Bradbury

| “So please, oh please, we beg, we pray, go throw your TV set away, and in its place you can install a lovely bookshelf on the wall.” – Roald Dahl

| “If you don’t like to read, you haven’t found the right book.” – J.K. Rowling

| “Think before you speak. Read before you think.” – Fran Lebowitz

| “Let’s be reasonable and add an eighth day to the week that is devoted exclusively to reading.” – Lena Dunham

| “The reading of all good books is like conversation with the finest (people) of the past centuries.” – Descartes

| “In the case of good books, the point is not to see how many of them you can get through, but rather how many can get through to you.” – Mortimer J. Adler

| “Reading one book is like eating one potato chip.” – Diane Duane

| “Books are a uniquely portable magic.” – Stephen King

| “I read a book one day and my whole life was changed.” – Orhan Pamuk

| “People say that life is the thing, but I prefer reading.” – Logan Pearsall Smith

| “Today a reader, tomorrow a leader.” – Margaret Fuller

| “People can lose their lives in libraries. They ought to be warned.” – Saul Bellow

| “A good book is an event in my life.” – Stendhal

| “Reading brings us unknown friends” – Honoré de Balzac

| “The world was hers for the reading.” – Betty Smith

| “I kept always two books in my pocket, one to read, one to write in.” – Robert Louis Stevenson

| “The person who deserves most pity is a lonesome one on a rainy day who doesn’t know how to read.” – Benjamin Franklin

| “Once you have read a book you care about, some part of it is always with you.” – Louis L’Amour

| “Literature is the most agreeable way of ignoring life.” – Fernando Pessoa

| “No. I can survive well enough on my own—if given the proper reading material.” – Sarah J. Maas

| “There is more treasure in books than in all the pirate’s loot on Treasure Island.” – Walt Disney

| “We are of opinion that instead of letting books grow moldy behind an iron grating, far from the vulgar gaze, it is better to let them wear out by being read.” – Jules Verne

| “My alma mater was books, a good library…. I could spend the rest of my life reading, just satisfying my curiosity.” – Malcolm X

| “It’s not that I don’t like people. It’s just that when I’m in the company of others – even my nearest and dearest – there always comes a moment when I’d rather be reading a book.” – Maureen Corrigan

| “Books to the ceiling, Books to the sky, My pile of books is a mile high. How I love them! How I need them! I’ll have a long beard by the time I read them.” – Arnold Lobel

| “There is nothing more luxurious than eating while you read—unless it be reading while you eat.” – E. Nesbit

| “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.” – Carl Sagan

| “I have a passion for teaching kids to become readers, to become comfortable with a book, not daunted. Books shouldn’t be daunting, they should be funny, exciting and wonderful; and learning to be a reader gives a terrific advantage.” – Roald Dahl

| “Man reading should be man intensely alive. The book should be a ball of light in one’s hand.” – Ezra Pound

| “If we encounter a man of rare intellect, we should ask him what books he reads.” – Ralph Waldo Emerson

| “Always read something that will make you look good if you die in the middle of it.” – P.J. O’Rourke

| “Many people, myself among them, feel better at the mere sight of a book.” – Jane Smiley

| “Beware of the person of one book.” – Thomas Aquinas

| “Read the best books first, or you may not have a chance to read them at all.” – Henry David Thoreau

| “Make it a rule never to give a child a book you would not read yourself.” – George Bernard Shaw

| “Books serve to show a man that those original thoughts of his aren’t very new after all.” – Abraham Lincoln

| “I can’t imagine a man really enjoying a book and reading it only once.” – C.S. Lewis

| “You know you’ve read a good book when you turn the last page and feel a little as if you have lost a friend.” – Paul Sweeney

| “Some books leave us free and some books make us free.” – Ralph Waldo Emerson

| “Once you learn to read, you will be forever free.” – Frederick Douglas

| “There are many little ways to enlarge your child’s world. Love of books is the best of all.” – Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis

| “Wear the old coat and buy the new book.” – Austin Phelps

| “You may have tangible wealth untold. Caskets of jewels and coffers of gold. Richer than I you can never be — I had a mother who read to me.” – Strickland Gillilan

| “The man who does not read good books is no better than the man who can’t.” – Mark Twain

| “To learn to read is to light a fire; every syllable that is spelled out is a spark.” – Victor Hugo

| “Oh, magic hour, when a child first knows she can read printed words!” – Betty Smith

| “A book is a gift you can open again and again.” – Garrison Keillor

| “Fill your house with stacks of books, in all the crannies and all the nooks.” – Dr. Seuss

| “Show me a family of readers, and I will show you the people who move the world.” – Napoléon Bonaparte

| “A classic is a book that has never finished saying what it has to say.” – Italo Calvino

| “I have always imagined that paradise will be a kind of library.” – Jorge Luis Borges

| “Reading is a discount ticket to everywhere.” – Mary Schmich

| “No entertainment is so cheap as reading, nor any pleasure so lasting.” – Mary Wortley Montagu

| “If you are going to get anywhere in life you have to read a lot of books.” – Roald Dahl

| “That perfect tranquility of life, which is nowhere to be found but in retreat, a faithful friend and a good library.” – Aphra Behn

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

| “Rainy days should be spent at home with a cup of tea and a good book.” – Bill Watterson

| “These books gave Matilda a hopeful and comforting message: You are not alone.” – Roald Dahl

| “I guess there are never enough books.” – John Steinbeck

| “Despite the enormous quantity of books, how few people read! And if one reads profitably, one would realize howmuch stupid stuff the vulgar herd is content to swallow every day.” – Voltaire

| “Libraries will get you through times of no money better than money will get you through times of no libraries.” – Anne Herbert

| “Ah, how good it is to be among people who are reading.” – Rainer Maria Rilke

| “Children are made readers on the laps of their parents.” – Emilie Buchwald

| “I couldn’t live a week without a private library – indeed, I’d part with all my furniture and squat and sleep on the floor before I’d let go of the 1500 or so books I possess.” – H.P. Lovecraft

| Books are good company, in sad times and happy times, for books are people – people who have managed to stay alive by hiding between the covers of a book.” – E.B. White

| “Luckily, I always travel with a book, just in case I have to wait on line for Santa, or some such inconvenience.” – David Levithan

| “Outside of a dog, a book is a man’s best friend. Inside of a dog, it’s too dark to read.” – Groucho Marx

| “Somebody who only reads newspapers and at best books of contemporary authors looks to me like an extremely near-sighted person who scorns eyeglasses. He is completely dependent on the prejudices and fashions of his times, since he never gets to see or hear anything else.” – Albert Einstein

| “I always read. You know how sharks have to keep swimming or they die? I’m like that. If I stop reading, I die.” – Patrick Rothfuss

| “There is no Frigate like a Book To take us Lands away” – Emily Dickinson

| “I intend to put up with nothing that I can put down.” – Edgar Allan Poe

| “Books are not made for furniture, but there is nothing else that so beautifully furnishes a house.” – Henry Ward Beecher

| “I took a speed-reading course and read War and Peace in twenty minutes. It involves Russia.” – Woody Allen

| “There are worse crimes than burning books. One of them is not reading them.” – Joseph Brodsky

| “I declare after all there is no enjoyment like reading! How much sooner one tires of any thing than of a book! — When I have a house of my own, I shall be miserable if I have not an excellent library.” – Jane Austen

| “Books break the shackles of time – proof that humans can work magic.” – Carl Sagan

| “Employ your time in improving yourself by other men’s writings so that you shall come easily by what others have labored hard for.” – Socrates

| “For my whole life, my favorite activity was reading. It’s not the most social pastime.” – Audrey Hepburn

| “Reading for me, is spending time with a friend.” – Gary Paulsen

| “From the reading of ‘good books’ there comes a richness of life that can be obtained in no other way.” – Gordon B. Hinckley

| “Fools have a habit of believing that everything written by a famous author is admirable. For my part I read only to please myself and like only what suits my taste.” – Voltaire

| “How many a man has dated a new era in his life from the reading of a book.” – Henry David Thoreau

| “Reading is a basic tool in the living of a good life.” – Mortimer J. Adler

| “A children’s story that can only be enjoyed by children is not a good children’s story in the slightest.” – C.S. Lewis

| “It is a great thing to start life with a small number of really good books which are your very own.” – Arthur Conan Doyle

| “Finally, from so little sleeping and so much reading, his brain dried up and he went completely out of his mind.” – Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra

| “What better occupation, really, than to spend the evening at the fireside with a book, with the wind beating on the windows and the lamp burning bright.” – Gustave Flaubert

| “I’m old-fashioned and think that reading books is the most glorious pastime that humankind has yet devised.” – Wisława Szymborska

| “Never put off till tomorrow the book you can read today.” – Holbrook Jackson

| “What kind of life can you have in a house without books?” – Sherman Alexie

| “Of course anyone who truly loves books buys more of them than he or she can hope to read in one fleeting lifetime. A good book, resting unopened in its slot on a shelf, full of majestic potentiality, is the most comforting sort of intellectual wallpaper.” – David Quammen

| “Reading makes a full man; conference a ready man; and writing an exact man. Francis Bacon

| “How many a man has dated a new era in his life from the reading of a book. Henry David Thoreau

| “A truly good book teaches me better than to read it. I must soon lay it down, and commence living on its hint. What I began by reading, I must finish by acting. Henry David Thoreau

| “A good book is an education of the heart. It enlarges your sense of human possibility what human nature is of what happens in the world. It’s a creator of inwardness. Susan Sontag

| “The keys to life are running and reading. When you’re running, there’s a little person that talks to you and says, ‘Oh I’m tired. My lung’s about to pop. I’m so hurt. There’s no way I can possibly continue.’ You want to quit. If you learn how to defeat that person when you’re running. You will how to not quit when things get hard in your life. For reading: there have been gazillions of people that have lived before all of us. There’s no new problem you could have: with your parents, with school, with a bully. There’s no new problem that someone hasn’t already had and written about it in a book. Will Smith

| “I started reading literature at 17 or 18, and I felt this extra beat to life. Richard Ford

| “The more I read, the more I acquire, the more certain I am that I know nothing. Voltaire

| “Shakespeare, Dickens, Mark Twain, and so many others were my dearest friends and greatest teachers. Lloyd Alexander

| “I’ve never known any trouble than an hour’s reading didn’t assuage. Arthur Schopenhauer

| “I’m reading more than ever. I used to find it tedious, but now it’s like my little friend – it takes my mind off things. Billie Piper

| “Reading builds the educated and informed electorate so vital to our democracy. Brad Henry

| “I think reading is important for a variety of things. I mean, first of all, it’s a way to get information and find out what’s going on in the world. But also, it helps your imagination. Breckin Meyer

| “Reading serves as a good escape when you’re in the middle of doing crazy things. Carly Rae Jepsen

| “Reading and discovering fiction has taught me how to empathize, understand falling in love and all those complex relationships that people have to deal with. Daniel Tammet

| “Life being very short, and the quiet hours of it few, we ought to waste none of them in reading valueless books. John Ruskin

| “Reading and life are not separate but symbiotic. And for this serious task of imaginative discovery and self-discovery, there is and remains one perfect symbol: the printed book. Julian Barnes

| “I like reading books because we learn from books, we learn about history, we learn even about future. Malala Yousafzai

| “Any book that helps a child to form a habit of reading, to make reading one of his deep and continuing needs, is good for him. Maya Angelou

| “Mere reading of the scriptures is not enough. A person cannot understand the true significance of the scriptures if he is attached to the world. Ramakrishna

| “Reading is a basic tool in the living of a good life. Joseph Addison

| “Reading is to the mind what exercise is to the body. Joseph Addison

| “Properly, we should read for power. Man reading should be man intensely alive. The book should be a ball of light in one’s hand. Ezra Pound

| “With one day’s reading a man may have the key in his hands. Ezra Pound

| “It is a good thing for an uneducated man to read books of quotations. Winston Churchill

| “Sit down and read. Educate yourself for the coming conflicts. Mary Harris Jones

QUOTES ABOUT READING BOOKS IS GREAT BUT…

| “If you only read the books that everyone else is reading, you can only think what everyone else is thinking. Haruki Murakami

| “Reading furnishes the mind only with materials of knowledge; it is thinking that makes what we read ours. John Locke

| “I hate books; they only teach us to talk about things we know nothing about. Jean-Jacques Rousseau

| “Reading is more of a left-brain process, and listening to music is a right-brain function. Maynard James Keenan

| “We cannot learn men from books. Benjamin Disraeli

| “Do not be guilty of possessing a library of learned books while lacking learning yourself. Desiderius Erasmus

EVEN MORE READING QUOTES

| “We shouldn’t teach great books; we should teach a love of reading. B. F. Skinner

| “Some day you will be old enough to start reading fairy tales again. C.S. Lewis

| “Children should learn that reading is pleasure, not just something that teachers make you do in school. Beverly Cleary

| “Reading is equivalent to thinking with someone else’s head instead of with one’s own. Arthur Schopenhauer

| “Reading, like writing, is a creative act. If readers only bring a narrow range of themselves to the book, then they’ll only see their narrow range reflected in it. Ben Okri

| “My Alma mater was books, a good library… I could spend the rest of my life reading, just satisfying my curiosity. Malcolm X

| “What is reading, but silent conversation. Charles Lamb

| “Writing and reading is to me synonymous with existing. Gertrude Stein

| “The best advice I ever got was that knowledge is power and to keep reading. David Bailey

| “When you cease from labour, fill up your time in reading, meditation, and prayer: and while your hands are labouring, let your heart be employed, as much as possible, in divine thoughts. David Brainerd

| “I didn’t go to school much, so I taught myself what I knew from reading. Doris Lessing

| “If one cannot enjoy reading a book over and over again, there is no use in reading it at all. Oscar Wilde

| “Whatever the cost of our libraries, the price is cheap compared to that of an ignorant nation. Walter Cronkite

| “Read not to contradict and confute, nor to believe and take for granted… but to weigh and consider. Francis Bacon

| “There are worse crimes than burning books. One of them is not reading them. Joseph Brodsky

| “I spend a lot of time reading. Bill Gates, Co-founder of Microsoft