216 best quotes about books and reading

1. "If you only read the books that everyone else is reading, you can only think what everyone else is thinking."
Haruki Murakami
2. "There is no problem that a library card can't solve."
Eleanor Brown
3. "There are essentially two things that will make you wise: the books you read and the people you meet."
Jack Canfield
4. "The library is like a candy store where everything is free."
Jamie Ford
5. "If you love books enough, books will love you back."
Jo Walton
6. "Books and doors are the same thing. You open them, and you go through into another world."
Jeanette Winterson
7. "Be curious. Read widely. Try new things. What people call intelligence just boils down to curiosity."
Aaron Swartz
8. "Read. Read anything. Read the things they say are good for you, and the things they claim are junk. You'll find what you need to find. Just read."
Neil Gaiman
9. "It is with books as with men: a very small number play a great part."
Voltaire
10. "A good book should leave you....slightly exhausted at the end. You live several lives while reading it."
William Styron
11. "A house without books is like a room without windows. No man has a right to bring up his children without surrounding them with books, if he has the means to buy them. It is a wrong to his family. He cheats them! Children learn to read by being in the presence of books. The love of knowledge comes with reading and grows upon it."
Horace Mann
12. "What we become depends on what we read after all of the professors have finished with us. The greatest university of all is a collection of books."
Thomas Carlyle
13. "Books can change your life but they require the commitment of time, in both the hunting out of good ones and in the reading of them."
Tania Ahsan
14. "It isn't what the book costs; it's what it will cost if you don't read it."
Jim Rohn
15. "When you lose yourself in a book the hours grow wings and fly."
Chloe Thurlow
16. "To know a man's library is, in some measure, to know a man's mind."
Geraldine Brooks
17. "Reading furnishes the mind only with materials of knowledge; it is thinking that makes what we read ours."
John Locke
18. "Reading is a means of thinking with another person's mind; it forces you to stretch your own."
Charles Scribner Jr
19. "Resolve to edge in a little reading every day, if it is but a single sentence. If you gain fifteen minutes a day, it will make itself felt at the end of the year."
Horace Mann
20. "Literature is the safe and traditional vehicle through which we learn about the world and pass on values from one generation to the next. Books save lives."
Laurie Anderson
21. "Only a generation of readers will spawn a generation of writers."
Steven Spielberg
22. "I would never read a book if it were possible for me to talk half an hour with the man who wrote it."
Woodrow Wilson
23. "Keep reading books, but remember that a book is only a book, and you should learn to think for yourself."
Maxim Gorky
24. "A half-read book is a half-finished love affair."
David Mitchell
25. "If you have a garden and a library, you have everything you need."
Marcus Tullius Cicero
26. "There are books of which the backs and covers are by far the best parts."
Charles Dickens
27. "There is no mistaking a real book when one meets it. It is like falling in love."
Christopher Morley
28. "I think of life as a good book. The further you get into it, the more it begins to make sense."
Harold Kushner
29. "The real purpose of books is to trap the mind into doing its own thinking."
Christopher Morley
30. "Books are the carriers of civilization. Without books, history is silent, literature dumb, science crippled, thought and speculation at a standstill."
Barbara W. Tuchman
31. "Books are the compasses and telescopes and sextants and charts which other men have prepared to help us navigate the dangerous seas of human life."
Jesse Lee Bennett
32. "Reading is the sole means by which we slip, involuntarily, often helplessly, into another's skin, another's voice, another's soul."
Joyce Carol Oates
33. "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
34. "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.... If it's good, you'll find out. If it's not, throw it out of the window.
35. "I shall be miserable if I have not an excellent library."
Jane Austen
36. "Make it a rule never to give a child a book you would not read yourself."
George Bernard Shaw
37. "To read is to fly: it is to soar to a point of vantage which gives a view over wide terrains of history, human variety, ideas, shared experience and the fruits of many inquiries."
A.C. Grayling
38. "Comics are a gateway drug to literacy."
Art Spiegelman
39. "Read. Everything you can get your hands on. Read until words become your friends. Then when you need to find one, they will jump into your mind, waving their hands for you to pick them. And you can select whichever you like..."
Karen Witemeyer
40. "There are perhaps no days of our childhood we lived so fully as those we spent with a favorite book."
Marcel Proust
41. "So it is with children who learn to read fluently and well: They begin to take flight into whole new worlds as effortlessly as young birds take to the sky."
William James
42. "To learn to read is to light a fire; every syllable that is spelled out is a spark."
Victor Hugo
43. "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 Gillian
44. "Literacy is a bridge from misery to hope."
Kofi Annan
45. "Read 500 pages…every day. That's how knowledge works. It builds up, like compound interest. All of you can do it, but I guarantee not many of you will do it."
Warren Buffet
46. "Drink deeply from good books."
John Wooden
47. "Reading is still the main way that I both learn new things and test my understanding."
Bill Gates
48. "When we are collecting books, we are collecting happiness."
Vincent Starrett
49. "Where is human nature so weak as in the bookstore?"
Henry Ward Beecher
50. "Anyone who reads a book with a sense of obligation does not understand the art of reading."
Lin Yutang
51. "There is no substitute for books in the life of a child."
Mary Ellen Chase
52. "The book to read is not the one which thinks for you, but the one which makes you think."
James McCosh
53. "Reading... a vacation for the mind."
Dave Barry
54. "A man only learns by two things; one is reading and the other is association with smarter people."
Will Rogers
55. "Reading is an act of resistance in a landscape of distraction."
David L. Ulin
56. "A capacity and taste for reading gives access to whatever has already been discovered by others."
Abraham Lincoln
57. "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
58. "A good book has no ending."
R.D. Cumming
59. "In a good book the best is between the lines."
Swedish Proverb
60. "There is no friend as loyal as a book."
Ernest Hemingway
61. "Always read something that will make you look good if you die in the middle of it."
O'Rourke
62. "No two persons ever read the same book."
Edmund Wilson
63. "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
64. "Once you have read a book you care about, some part of it is always with you."
Louis L'Amour
65. "You can't buy happiness, but you can buy books and that's kind of the same thing."
Anonymous
66. "Reading is essential for those who seek to rise above the ordinary."
Jim Rohn
67. "The worst thing about new books is that they keep us from reading the old ones."
Joseph Joubert
68. "Think before you speak. Read before you think."
Fran Lebowitz
69. "If one cannot enjoy reading a book over and over again, there is no use in reading it at all."
Oscar Wilde
70. "You can't enjoy art or books in a hurry."
E.A. Bucchianeri
71. "One trouble with developing speed reading skills is that by the time you realize a book is boring you've already finished it."
Franklin P. Jones
72. "Reading for me, is spending time with a friend."
Gary Paulsen
73. "There is nothing more luxurious than eating while you read—unless it be reading while you eat."
E. Nesbit
74. "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
75. "No. I can survive well enough on my own—if given the proper reading material."
Sarah J. Maas
76. "I guess there are never enough books."
John Steinbeck
77. "Literature is the most agreeable way of ignoring life."
Fernando Pessoa
78. "Let's be reasonable and add an eighth day to the week that is devoted exclusively to reading."
Lena Dunham
79. "In books I have traveled, not only to other worlds, but into my own."
Anna Quindlen
80. "I love books, by the way, way more than movies. Movies tell you what to think. A good book lets you choose a few thoughts for yourself."
Karen Marie Moning
81. "Let us read, and let us dance; these two amusements will never do any harm to the world."
Voltaire
82. "Reading without reflecting is like eating without digesting."
Edmund Burke
83. "Rainy days should be spent at home with a cup of tea and a good book."
Bill Watterson
84. "Never lend books, for no one ever returns them; the only books I have in my library are books that other folks have lent me."
Anatole France
85. "The person who deserves most pity is a lonesome one on a rainy day who doesn't know how to read."
Benjamin Franklin
86. "It's a rare book that wins the battle against drooping eyelids."
Tracy Chevalier
87. "Books are mirrors: you only see in them what you already have inside you."
Carlos Ruiz Zafón, The Shadow of the Wind
88. "Once you learn to read, you will be forever free."
Frederick Douglass
89. "To be a librarian is not to be neutral, or passive, or waiting for a question. It is to be a radical positive change agent within your community."
R. David Lankes
90. "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
91. "An hour spent reading is one stolen from paradise."
Thomas Wharton
92. "The only thing you absolutely have to know is the location of the library."
Albert Einstein
93. "Books make great gifts because they have whole worlds inside of them and it's much cheaper to buy somebody a book than it is to buy them the whole world!"
Neil Gaiman
94. "The pleasure of all reading is doubled when one lives with another who shares the same books."
Katherine Mansfield
95. "The greatest gift is a passion for reading."
Elizabeth Hardwick
96. "A book is the most effective weapon against intolerance and ignorance."
Lyndon Baines Johnson
97. "A book is the most effective weapon against intolerance and ignorance."
Lyndon Baines Johnson
98. "To acquire the habit of reading is to construct for yourself a refuge from almost all of the miseries of life."
W Somerset Maugham
99. "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
100. "Except a living man, there is nothing more wonderful than a book!"
Charles Kingsley
101. "Libraries are the wardrobes of literature."
George Dyer
102. "In the best books great men talk to us, give us their most precious thoughts, and pour their souls into ours."
William Ellery Channing
103. "That's the thing about books. They let you travel without moving your feet."
Jhumpa Lahiri
104. "A book is a dream you hold in your hands."
Neil Gaiman
105. "In the best books great men talk to us, give us their most precious thoughts, and pour their souls into ours."
William Ellery Channing
106. "Reading should not be presented to children as a chore, a duty. It should be offered as a gift."
Kate DiCamillo
107. "A first book has some of the sweetness of a first love."
Robert Aris Willmott
108. "I read my eyes out and can’t read half enough... The more one reads the more one sees we have to read."
John Adams
109. "A book is a device to ignite the imagination."
Alan Bennett
110. "“If you truly love a book, you should sleep with it, write in it, read aloud from it, and fill its pages with muffin crumbs."
Anne Fadiman
111. "When I discovered libraries, it was like having Christmas every day."
Jean Fritz
112. "Only bad books have good endings. If a book is any good, it's ending is always bad - because you don't want the book to end."
Pseudonymous Bosch
113. "A man is known by the books he reads."
Ralph Waldo Emerson
114. "There's nothing to match curling up with a good book when there's a repair job to be done around the house."
Joe Ryan
115. "I have a real soft spot in my heart for librarians and people who care about books."
Ann Richards
116. "Readers are lucky - they will never be bored or lonely."
Natalie Babbitt
117. "Real luxury is time and opportunity to read for pleasure"
Jane Brody
118. "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
119. "What you must remember about hardcover books is that they are like tattoos. Once you get one, it's never really going to go away."
Chip Kidd
120. "If you only read the books that everyone else is reading, you can only think what everyone else is thinking."
Haruki Murakami
121. "If a book is well-written I always find it too short."
Jane Austen
122. "The trick is to teach yourself to read in small sips as well as long swallows."
Stephen King
123. "Reading without thinking will confuse you. Thinking without reading will place you in danger."
Confucius
124. "Reading is not optional."
Walter Dean Myers
125. "When I say to a parent, "read to a child", I don't want it to sound like medicine. I want it to sound like chocolate."
Mem Fox
126. "Through books you can start today where the great thinkers of yesterday left off, because books have immortalized man's knowledge."
Wilferd Peterson
127. "If you want your children to be intelligent, read them fairy tales. If you want them to be more intelligent, read them more fairy tales."
Albert Einstein
128. "It is not enough to simply teach children to read; we have to give them something worth reading."
Katherine Paterson
129. "The more that you read, the more things you will know. The more that you learn, the more places you'll go."
Dr. Seuss
130. "Men must read for amusement as well as for knowledge."
Henry Ward Beecher
131. "Be as careful of the books you read, as of the company you keep, for your habits and character will be as much influenced by the former as the latter."
Paxton Hood
132. "Reading is a basic tool in the living of a good life."
Mortimer J. Adler
133. "Reading is important, because if you can read, you can learn anything about everything and everything about anything."
Tomie dePaola
134. "To read a book for the first time is to make an acquaintance with a new friend; to read it for a second time is to meet an old one."
Chinese saying
135. "People who hate to read scare me. Good books have kept me alive."
Unknown
136. "Reading is a way for me to expand my mind, open my eyes, and fill up my heart."
Oprah
137. "The worth of a book is to be measured by what you can carry away from it."
James Bryce
138. "Anyone who says they have only one life to live must not know how to read a book."
Unknown
139. "When you sell a man a book you don't sell him just 12 ounces of paper and ink and glue – you sell him a whole new life."
Christopher Morley
140. "What is reading but silent conversation?"
Walter Savage Landor
141. "The man who does not read good books has no advantage over the man who can’t read."
Mark Twain
142. "The love of books is a love which requires neither justification, apology, nor defense."
J.A. Langford
143. "Reading takes us away from home, but more important, it finds homes for us everywhere."
Hazel Rochman
144. "Reading is to the mind, what exercise is to the body."
Joseph Addison
145. "Reading is a discount ticket to everywhere."
Mary Schmich
146. "No matter what his rank or position may be, the lover of books is the richest and the happiest."
J.A. Langford
147. "I've never known any trouble that an hour's reading didn't assuage."
Charles de Secondat
148. "Good as it is to inherit a library, it is better to collect one."
Augustine Birrell
149. "The reading of all good books is like a conversation with the finest men of past centuries."
Rene Descartes, philosopher and mathematician (1596-1650)
150. "Books are like imprisoned souls till someone takes them down from a shelf and frees them."
Samuel Butler, writer (1835-1902)
151. "You're never too old, too wacky, too wild, to pick up a book and read to a child."
Dr. Seuss
152. "A true friend is like a good book, the inside is better than the cover."
Anonymous
153. "You're never alone when you're reading a book."
Susan Wiggs
154. "There is no such thing as a child who hates to read; there are only children who have not found the right book."
Frank Serafini
155. "He that loves reading has everything within his reach."
William Godwin
156. "A child who reads will be an adult who thinks."
author unknown
157. "It is books that are the key to the wide world; if you can't do anything else, read all that you can."
Jane Hamilton
158. "Good books, like good friends, are few and chosen; the more select, the more enjoyable."
Louisa May Alcott
159. "Knowing you have something good to read before bed is among the most pleasurable of sensations."
Vladimir Nabokov
160. "Never put off till tomorrow the book you can read today."
Holbrook Jackson
161. "Every book is a children’s book if the kid can read!"
Mitch Hedberg
162. "Miss a meal if you have to, but don't miss a book."
Jim Rohn
163. "I would be most content if my children grew up to be the kind of people who think interior decorating consists mostly of building enough bookshelves."
Anna Quindlen
164. "Books are hindrances to persisting stupidity."
Spanish proverb
165. "If you want to read about love and marriage, you have to buy two separate books."
Alan King
166. "A good reader should always have two books with him: one to read, the other one to lend."
Gabrielle Dubois
167. "I wanted to read immediately. The only fear was that of books coming to an end."
Eudora Welty
168. "The problem with books is that they end."
Caroline Kepnes
169. "My grandma always said that God made libraries so that people didn't have any excuse to be stupid."
Joan Bauer
170. "Books are the bees which carry the quickening pollen from one to another mind."
James Russell Lowell
171. "It is what you read when you don't have to that determines what you will be when you can't help it."
Oscar Wilde
172. "Books are not made for furniture, but there is nothing else that so beautifully furnishes a house."
Henry Ward Beecher
173. "It is better to read a little and ponder a lot than to read a lot and ponder a little."
Denis Parsons Burkitt
174. "You're the same today as you'll be in five years except for the people you meet and the books you read."
Charlie Jones
175. "Parents should leave books lying around marked 'forbidden' if they want their children to read."
Doris Lessing
176. "The best cinema in the world is the brain, and you know it when you read a good book."
Ridley Scott
177. "Reading brings us unknown friends"
Honoré de Balzac
178. "I find television very educating. Every time somebody turns on the set, I go into the other room and read a book."
Groucho Marx
179. "No book is really worth reading at the age of ten which is not equally – and often far more – worth reading at the age of fifty and beyond."
C.S. Lewis
180. "Today a reader, tomorrow a leader."
Margaret Fuller
181. "Read obsessively. It will make you a better human and a better writer."
Pittacus Lore
182. "What makes a good book? Simply put, a good book is one that you enjoy reading."
Carmela Dutra
183. "Don't buy books for your shelf, buy them for yourself."
Saji Ijiyemi
184. "When I think of all the books still left for me to read, I am certain of further happiness."
Jules Renard
185. "Wear the old coat and buy the new book."
Austin Phelps
186. "Just the knowledge that a good book is awaiting one at the end of a long day makes that day happier."
Kathleen Thompson Norris
187. "I have always imagined that paradise will be a kind of library."
orge Luis Borges
188. "I love books because I don't have to wait for the commercials to be over to find out what happens."
unknown
189. "My best friend is a person who will give me a book I have not read."
Abraham Lincoln
190. "A good book is the best of friends, the same today and forever."
Martin Tupper
191. "If you don't like to read, you haven’t found the right book."
J.K. Rowling
192. "I love the way that each book—any book—is its own journey. You open it, and off you go…."
Sharon Creech
193. "If you are going to get anywhere in life you have to read a lot of books."
Roald Dahl
194. "A man only learns in two ways, one by reading, and the other by association with smarter people."
Will Rogers
195. "Book lovers never go to bed alone."
Author unknown
196. "If we didn't have libraries, many people thirsty for knowledge would dehydrate."
Megan Jo Tetrick
197. "Everything comes to him who waits, except a loaned book."
Kin Hubbard
198. "To become smart you need to read just ten books — But to find those ten, you need to read thousands."
Unknown author
199. "Books had instant replay long before televised sports."
Bern Williams
200. "Reading—the best state yet to keep absolute loneliness at bay."
William Styron
201. "Read the best books first, or you may not have a chance to read them at all."
Henry David Thoreau
202. "The book you don't read won't help."
Jim Rohn
203. "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
204. "One of the joys of reading is the ability to plug into the shared wisdom of mankind."
Ishmael Reed
205. "There is more treasure in books than in all the pirate's loot on Treasure Island."
Walt Disney
206. "When I get a little money I buy books; and if any is left I buy food and clothes."
Desiderius Erasmus
207. "Reading gives us someplace to go when we have to stay where we are."
Mason Cooley
208. "A house without books is like a room without windows. No man has a right to bring up his children without surrounding them with books, if he has the means to buy them. ... The love of knowledge comes with reading and grows upon it."
Horace Mann
209. "Reading, after a certain age, diverts the mind too much from its creative pursuits. Any man who reads too much and uses his own brain too little falls into lazy habits of thinking."
Albert Einstein
210. "Read what you love until you love to read."
Naval Ravikant
211. "That's the thing about books. They let you travel without moving your feet."
Jhumpa Lahiri
212. "People who say that I'm hard to shop for must not know where to buy books."
unknown author
213. "Reading is important. If you know how to read, then the whole world opens up to you."
Barack Obama
214. "Show me a family of readers, and I will show you the people who move the world."
Napoleon Bonaparte
215. "I think books are like people, in the sense that they'll turn up in your life when you most need them."
Emma Thompson
216. "Some books leave us free and some books make us free."
Ralph Waldo Emerson