Get ready for dozens of reading quotes that'll make you feel all warm and bookwormy inside
70 Quotes About Reading That’ll Inspire You to Open a Book
Updated Sep. 16, 2024
Famous reading quotes
1. “A reader lives a thousand lives before he dies. The man who never reads lives only one.” —George R.R. Martin, A Dance with Dragons
2. “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, Letters of John Adams, Addressed to His Wife
3. “Who can see the barely perceptible line between the man who cannot read at all and the man who does not read at all?” —Joseph D. Eggleson Jr.
4. “If you only read the books that everyone else is reading, you can only think what everyone else is thinking.” —Haruki Murakami, Norwegian Wood
5. “You can’t get a cup of tea large enough or a book long enough to suit me.” —C.S. Lewis
6. “Until I feared I would lose it, I never loved to read. One does not love breathing.” —Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird
7. “If a book is well-written, I always find it too short.” —Jane Austen
8. “A beggar’s book outworths a noble’s blood.” —William Shakespeare, Henry VIII
9. “If you find a book you really want to read but it hasn’t been written yet, then you must write it.” —Toni Morrison
10. “But do not read, as the children read, to amuse yourself, nor as ambitious people read, to get instruction. No! Read to live!” —Gustave Flaubert
11. “I told the Englishman that my alma mater was books, a good library. Every time I catch a plane, I have with me a book that I want to read—and that’s a lot of books these days. If I weren’t out here every day battling the white man, I could spend the rest of my life reading, just satisfying my curiosity—because you can hardly mention anything I’m not curious about.” —Malcolm X, The Autobiography of Malcolm X
12. “There are worse crimes than burning books. One of them is not reading them.” —Joseph Brodsky
13. “You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read. It was books that taught me that the things that tormented me most were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive, who had ever been alive.” ―James Baldwin
14. “If you don’t like to read, you haven’t found the right book.” ―J.K. Rowling
15. “A well-read woman is a dangerous creature.” — Lisa Kleypas, A Wallflower Christmas
16. “The person who deserves most pity is a lonesome one on a rainy day who doesn’t know how to read.” ―Benjamin Franklin
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Funny quotes about reading
17. “I must say I find television very educational. The minute somebody turns it on, I go into the library and read a good book.” —Groucho Marx
18. “She is too fond of books, and it has turned her brain.” —Louisa May Alcott, Work: A Story of Experience
19. “Where is human nature so weak as in a bookstore?” —Henry Ward Beecher, Star Papers
20. “Books are no more threatened by Kindle than stairs by elevators.” —Stephen Fry
21. “Books are the ultimate Dumpees: Put them down and they’ll wait for you forever; pay attention to them and they always love you back.” —John Green, An Abundance of Katherines
22. “Always read something that will make you look good if you die in the middle of it.” —P.J. O’Rourke
23. “People can lose their lives in libraries. They ought to be warned.” —Saul Bellow
24. “Never trust anyone who has not brought a book with them.” ―Lemony Snicket (aka Daniel Handler), Horseradish: Bitter Truths You Can’t Avoid
25. “Why can’t people just sit and read books and be nice to each other?” ―David Baldacci, The Camel Club
26. “Take a good book to bed with you—books do not snore.” ―Thea Dorn
27. “Reading good books ruins you for enjoying bad books.” ―Mary Ann Shaffer, The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society
Short quotes about reading
28. “A good book has no ending.” —R.D. Cumming
29. “A writer only begins a book. A reader finishes it.” —Samuel Johnson
30. “Think before you speak. Read before you think.” —Fran Lebowitz, The Fran Lebowitz Reader
31. “Books are a uniquely portable magic.” —Stephen King, On Writing
32. “Poetry is news that stays news.” —Ezra Pound
33. “A good book is an event in my life.” —Stendhal, The Red and the Black
34. “I have always imagined Paradise as a kind of library.” —Jorge Luis Borges, Dreamtigers
35. “Reading one book is like eating one potato chip.” —Diane Duane, So You Want to Be a Wizard
36. “A half-read book is a half-finished love affair.” ―David Mitchell, Cloud Atlas
37. “In a word, literature is my utopia.” —Helen Keller, The Story of My Life
38. “Reading is to the mind what exercise is to the body.” —Joseph Addison
Quotes about reading for kids
39. “Let children read whatever they want and then talk about it with them.” ―Judy Blume
40. “There are many little ways to enlarge your child’s world. Love of books is the best of all.” —Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis
41. “Make it a rule never to give a child a book you would not read yourself.” —George Bernard Shaw
42. “Fairy tales do not give the child his first idea of bogey. What fairy tales give the child is his first clear idea of the possible defeat of bogey.” —G.K. Chesterton, “The Red Angel”
43. “Children are made readers on the laps of their parents.” —Emilie Buchwald
44. “I am almost inclined to set it up as a canon that a children’s story which is enjoyed only by children is a bad children’s story.” ―C.S. Lewis, On Stories
45. “Today a reader, tomorrow a leader.” ―W. Fusselman
46. “You have to write the book that wants to be written. And if the book will be too difficult for grown-ups, then you write it for children.” ―Madeleine L’Engle
47. “A childhood without books—that would be no childhood. That would be like being shut out from the enchanted place where you can go and find the rarest kind of joy.” ―Astrid Lindgren
48. “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 Can Read With My Eyes Shut!
49. “Reading should not be presented to children as a chore, a duty. It should be offered as a gift.” —Kate DiCamillo
Inspirational quotes about reading
50. Reading makes immigrants of us all—it takes us away from home, but more important, it finds homes for us everywhere.” —Hazel Rochman
51. “What you read when you don’t have to determines what you will be when you can’t help it.” —Charles Francis Potter
52. “Reading gives us someplace to go when we have to stay where we are.” —Mason Cooley
53. “I have forgotten the books I have read, and so I have the dinners I have eaten; but they both helped to make me.” —Ralph Waldo Emerson
54. “Writing is perhaps the greatest of human inventions, binding together citizens of distant epochs. Books break the shackles of time. A book is proof that humans are capable of working magic.” —Carl Sagan, Cosmos
55. “Whenever you read a good book, somewhere in the world a door opens to allow in more light.” —Vera Nazarian
56. “Everything in the world exists in order to end up as a book.” —Stéphane Mallarmé
57. “No one ever reads a book. He reads himself through books, either to discover or to control himself.” —Romain Rolland, Journey Within
58. “We read to know we’re not alone.” ―William Nicholson, Shadowlands
59. “Books are the plane, and the train, and the road. They are the destination and the journey. They are home.” ―Anna Quindlen, How Reading Changed My Life
60. “A word after a word after a word is power.” ―Margaret Atwood, “Spelling”
61. “That is part of the beauty of all literature. You discover that your longings are universal longings, that you’re not lonely and isolated from anyone. You belong.” ―F. Scott Fitzgerald
Quotes about the joy of reading
62. “No entertainment is so cheap as reading, nor any pleasure so lasting.” —Lady M.W. Montagu
63. “Just the knowledge that a good book is awaiting one at the end of a long day makes that day happier.” —Kathleen Norris
64. “Many people, myself among them, feel better at the mere sight of a book.” —Jane Smiley, Thirteen Ways of Looking at the Novel
65. “Let us read, and let us dance—two amusements that will never do any harm to the world.” —Voltaire, Dictionnaire Philosophique
66. “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 Durable Satisfactions of Life
67. “I declare after all there is no enjoyment like reading! How much sooner one tires of anything 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, Pride and Prejudice
68. “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, Letters to the Children of Troy
69. “These books gave Matilda a hopeful and comforting message: You are not alone.” —Roald Dahl, Matilda
70. “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, A Reading Diary: A Passionate Reader’s Reflections on a Year of Books
If there’s one thing these quotes about reading prove, it’s this: Books are powerful things. They ignite the imagination, move us to tears and linger in our minds long after we finish the final page.
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Originally Published: December 08, 2020
