Some of the quotes are funny, some of them are inspiring and some of them are so accurate it’s scary. You may even have heard a few of the quotes we rounded up before or you might be a fan of the person who said one of the quotes. But no matter what, you’re sure to crack a smile as you go through each one on our list. Check out all 150 quotes about reading and books below. They’ll remind you why books are so special and why reading is one of the greatest treasures you can give yourself at any age.
150 Quotes About Reading and Books
- “The more that you read, the more things you will know. The more that you learn, the more places you’ll go.” —Dr. Seuss
- “Reading brings us unknown friends.” — Honoré de Balzac
- “There is more treasure in books than in all the pirate’s loot on Treasure Island."— Walt Disney
- “Make it a rule never to give a child a book you would not read yourself.”— George Bernard Shaw
- “A book is a gift you can open again and again.” — Garrison Keillor
- “Outside of a dog, a book is a man’s best friend. Inside of a dog, it’s too dark to read.” — Groucho Marx
- “Think before you speak. Read before you think.” — Fran Lebowitz
- “Reading is a discount ticket to everywhere.” — Mary Schmich
- “We read in bed because reading is halfway between life and dreaming, our own consciousness in someone else’s mind.” — Anna Quindlen
- “My alma mater was books, a good library…. I could spend the rest of my life reading, just satisfying my curiosity.” — Malcolm X
- “Books are a uniquely portable magic.” — Stephen King
- “Books and doors are the same thing. You open them, and you go through into another world.” — Jeanette Winterson
- “Books are mirrors: you only see in them what you already have inside you.” — Carlos Ruiz Zafón
- “A book is a way for your imagination to be wild and free.” — Unknown
- “Take a good book to bed with you – books do not snore.” — Thea Dorn
- “A well-read woman is a dangerous creature.” — Lisa Kleypas
- “I think books are like people, in the sense that they’ll turn up in your life when you most need them.” — Emma Thompson
- “A reader lives a thousand lives before he dies . . . The man who never reads lives only one.” — George R.R. Martin
- “There is no frigate like a book to take us lands away.” — Emily Dickinson
- “No. I can survive well enough on my own – if given the proper reading material.” — Sarah J. Maas
- “When you lose yourself in a book the hours grow wings and fly.”— Chloe Thurlow
- “The world belongs to those who read.” — Rick Holland
- “Reading one book is like eating one potato chip.” — Diane Duane
- “To know a man’s library is, in some measure, to know a man’s mind.”— Geraldine Brooks
- “If you don’t like to read, you haven’t found the right book.” — J.K. Rowling
- “Never put off till tomorrow the book you can read today.” — Holbrook Jackson
- “Read a thousand books, and your words will flow like a river.” — Lisa See
- “Reading is an intelligent way of not having to think.” — Walter Moers
- “A good book is an event in my life.” — Stendhal
- “Reading well is one of the great pleasures that solitude can afford you.”— Harold Bloom
- “The reading of all good books is like a conversation with the finest minds of past centuries.” — Rene Descartes
- “No two persons ever read the same book.” — Edmund Wilson
- “Books serve to show a man that those original thoughts of his aren’t very new after all.” — Abraham Lincoln
- “The library is inhabited by spirits that come out of the pages at night.” — Isabel Allende
- “Until I feared I would lose it, I never loved to read. One does not love breathing.” — Harper Lee
- “A peasant that reads is a prince in waiting.” — Walter Mosley
- “Books are both our luxuries and our daily bread.” — Henry Stevens
- “I have always imagined that paradise will be a kind of library.” — Jorge Luis Borges
- “These books gave Matilda a hopeful and comforting message: You are not alone.” — Roald Dahl 40.“’Once upon a time’ is one of the most magical phrases you’ll ever read.”— Unknown
- “Oh, magic hour, when a child first knows she can read printed words!”— Betty Smith
- “Reading should not be presented to children as a chore, a duty. It should be offered as a gift.” — Kate DiCamillo
- “Not all readers are leaders, but all leaders are readers.” — President Harry Truman
- I do not read a book; I hold a conversation with the author.” — Elbert Hubbar
- “A book is a version of the world. If you do not like it, ignore it; or offer your own version in return.” — Salman Rushdie
- “There are worse crimes than burning books. One of them is not reading them.” — Joseph Brodsky
- “Don’t get into a relationship with someone who doesn’t own any books.”— Unknown
- “Never trust anyone who has not brought a book with them.” — Lemony Snicket
- “Man reading should be man intensely alive. The book should be a ball of light in one’s hand.” — Ezra Pound
- “Let’s be reasonable and add an eighth day to the week that is devoted exclusively to reading.” — Lena Dunham
- “’The end’ is one of the saddest sentences you’ll ever come across.” — Unknown
- “Reading is departure and arrival.” — Terri Guillemets
- “Whenever you read a good book, somewhere in the world a door opens to allow in more light.” — Vera Nazarian
- “Some books leave us free and some books make us free.” — Ralph Waldo Emerson
- “Reading gives us someplace to go when we have to stay where we are.” — Mason Cooley
- “I have always imagined paradise as a kind of library.” — Jorge Luis Borges.
- “Children know perfectly well that unicorns aren’t real, but they also know that books about unicorns, if they are good books, are true books.” — Ursula K. LeGuin
- “Books should go where they will be most appreciated, and not sit unread, gathering dust on a forgotten shelf, don’t you agree?” — Christopher Paolini
- “The world was hers for the reading.” — Betty Smith
- “Putting down a good book can almost be an impossible act to do.” — Unknown
- “Some books should be tasted, some devoured, but only a few should be chewed and digested thoroughly.” — Sir Francis Bacon
- “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
- “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.
- “Rainy days should be spent at home with a cup of tea and a good book.” — Bill Watterson
- “Reading is an exercise in empathy; an exercise in walking in someone else’s shoes for a while.” —Malorie Blackman
- “If there is a book that you want to read, but it hasn’t been written yet, you must be the one to write it.” — Toni Morrison
- “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
- “Each book was a world unto itself, and in it I took refuge.” — Alberto Manguel
- “I love the smell of book ink in the morning.” — Umberto Eco
- “You can never get a cup of tea large enough or a book long enough to suit me.”— C.S. Lewis
- “A book is a garden, an orchard, a storehouse, a party, a company by the way, a counselor, a multitude of counselors.” — Charles Baudelaire
- “To learn to read is to light a fire; every syllable that is spelled out is a spark.”— Victor Hugo
- “For my whole life, my favorite activity was reading. It’s not the most social pastime.” — Audrey Hepburn 74.“Reading is an active, imaginative act; it takes work.” — Khaled Hosseini
- “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
- “Books are things of fiction that seem like reality.” — Unknown
- “Think of this – that the writer wrote alone, and the reader read alone, and they were alone with each other.” — A.S. Byatt
- “Once you have read a book you care about, some part of it is always with you.”— Louis L’Amour
- “You have to remember that it is impossible to commit a crime while reading a book.” — John Waters
- “Show me a family of readers, and I will show you the people who move the world.” — Napoleon Bonaparte
- “Reading – even browsing – an old book can yield sustenance denied by a database search.” — James Gleick
- “Reading makes immigrants of us all. It takes us away from home, but more important, it finds homes for us everywhere.” — Jean Rhys
- Reading is essential for those who seek to rise above the ordinary.”— Jim Rohn
- “It is a great thing to start life with a small number of really good books which are your very own.” — Arthur Conan Doyle
- “What a blessing it is to love books.” — Elizabeth von Arnim
- “No entertainment is so cheap as reading, nor any pleasure so lasting.” — Mary Wortley Montagu
- “If you’re looking for some magic in your life, open up a book.” — Unknown
- “There are many little ways to enlarge your world. Love of books is the best of all.” — Jacqueline Kennedy
- “A great book should leave you with many experiences, and slightly exhausted at the end. You live several lives while reading.” — William Styron
- “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
Reading Quotes
- “Books are the plane, and the train, and the road. They are the destination, and the journey. They are home.” — Anna Quindlen
- “What kind of life can you have in a house without books?” — Sherman Alexie
- “Once you learn to read, you will be forever free.” — Frederick Douglas
- “Reading… a vacation for the mind…” — Dave Barry
- “Reading is to the mind what exercise is to the body.” — Joseph Addison
- “It is better to know one book intimately than a hundred superficially.” — Donna Tartt
- “To acquire the habit of reading is to construct for yourself a refuge from almost all the miseries of life.” — W. Somerset Maugham
- “‘Classic’ – a book which people praise and don’t read.” — Mark Twain
- “Keep reading. It’s one of the most marvelous adventures that anyone can have.” — Lloyd Alexander
- “Always read something that will make you look good if you die in the middle of it.” — P.J. O’Rourke
- “Books are the movies of our minds.” — Unknown
- “Many people, myself among them, feel better at the mere sight of a book.”— Jane Smiley
- “It’s hard to believe that reading words on pages can truly change your life for the better.” — Unknown
- “If you stop to think about it, you’ll have to admit that all the stories in the world consist essentially of twenty-six letters. The letters are always the same, only the arrangement varies. From letters words are formed, from words sentences, from sentences chapters, and from chapters stories.” — Michael Ende
- “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
- “If one cannot enjoy reading a book over and over again, there is no use in reading it at all.” — Oscar Wilde
- “Maybe this is why we read, and why in moments of darkness we return to books: to find words for what we already know.” — Alberto Manguel
- “Books are the escape you never knew you needed until you start reading.”— Unknown
- “Only the very weak-minded refuse to be influenced by literature and poetry.”— Cassandra Clare
- “A half-read book is a half-finished love affair.” — David Mitchell
- “Turning the pages of a good book can influence you more than you might think.” — Unknown
- “What really knocks me out is a book that, when you’re all done reading it, you wish the author that wrote it was a terrific friend of yours and you could call him up on the phone whenever you felt like it. That doesn’t happen much, though.” — J.D. Salinger
- “I owe everything I am and everything I will ever be to books.” — Gary Paulse
- “The cheapest form of adventure is a book.” — Unknown
- “A good library will never be too neat, or too dusty, because somebody will always be in it, taking books off the shelves and staying up late reading them.” — Lemony Snicket
- “When we read a story, we inhabit it. The covers of the book are like a roof and four walls. What is to happen next will take place within the four walls of the story. And this is possible because the story’s voice makes everything its own.” — John Berger
- “Fairy tales are more than true: not because they tell us that dragons exist, but because they tell us that dragons can be beaten.” — Neil Gaiman
- “Character, to me, is the life’s blood of fiction.” — Donna Tartt
- “Writing comes from reading, and reading is the finest teacher of how to write.” — Annie Proulx
- “A book is a dream that you hold in your hand.” — Neil Gaiman
- “Has a person who hardly ever reads truly ever lived?” — Unknown
- “Fill your house with stacks of books, in all the crannies and all the nooks.” — Dr. Seuss
- “I guess there are never enough books.” — John Steinbeck
- “Every book is a new adventure.” — Unknown
- “Do not read, as children do, to amuse yourself, or like the ambitious, for the purpose of instruction. No, read in order to live.” — Gustave Flaubert
- “Books are not made for furniture, but there is nothing else that so beautifully furnishes a house.” — Henry Ward Beecher
- “Reading is a conversation. All books talk. But a good book listens as well.”— Mark Haddon
- “The unread story is not a story; it is little black marks on wood pulp. The reader, reading it, makes it live: a live thing, a story.” — Ursula K. LeGuin
- “In the end, we’ll all become stories.” — Margaret Atwood
- “Not reading should be a sin.” — Unknown
- “Libraries will get you through times of no money better than money will get you through times of no libraries.” — Anne Herbert
- “The only thing you absolutely have to know is the location of the library.”— Albert Einstein
- “Stories have endless possibilities and can take you any place your heart dreams of going.” — Unknown
- “Poetic language is a way of giving the sense of an answer, just a sense of one, that the story itself is unable to provide.” — Emily Ruskovich
- “Everyone should make reading one of their hobbies.” — Unknown
- “What isn’t said is as important as what is said.” — Colson Whitehead
- “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
- “The story is truly finished – and meaning is made – not when the author adds the last period, but when the reader enters.” — Celeste Ng
- “If you don’t see the book you want on the shelf, write it.” — Beverly Cleary
- “Wear the old coat and buy the new book.” — Austin Phelp
- “Happiness. That’s what books smell like. Happiness. That’s why I always wanted to have a bookshop. What better life than to trade in happiness?” — Saran MacLean
- “Only a generation of readers will spawn a generation of writers.” — Steven Spielberg
- “That’s the thing about books. They let you travel without moving your feet.”— Jhumpa Lahiri
- “A word after a word after a word is power.” — Margaret Atwood
- “I cannot remember the books I’ve read any more than the meals I have eaten; even so, they have made me.” — Ralph Waldo Emerson
- “Read, read, read. Read everything — trash, classics, good and bad, and see how they do it. Just like a carpenter who works as an apprentice and studies the master. Read! You’ll absorb it. Then write. If it’s good, you’ll find out. If it’s not, throw it out of the window.” — William Faulkner
- “Let others pride themselves about how many pages they have written; I’d rather boast about the ones I’ve read.” — Jorge Luis Borges
- “No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader. No surprise in the writer, no surprise in the reader.” — Robert Frost
- “If you don’t have time to read, you don’t have the time (or the tools) to write. Simple as that.” — Stephen King
- “Sleep is good, he said, and books are better.” — George R.R. Martin Check out…100 Inspirational Quotes100 Growth Mindset Quotes150 Life Quotes100 Never Give Up Quotes150 Goals Quotes100 Stay Positive Quotes
