Top 500 Book Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “Books are the training weights of the mind.”

— Epictetus

Also featured in: Stoic Philosophy Quotes

2. “The reading of all good books is like a conversation with the finest minds of past centuries.”

— René Descartes

Also featured in: Reading Quotes

3. “Reading is essential for those who seek to rise above the ordinary. We must not permit anything to stand between us and the book that could change our lives.”

— Jim Rohn

Also featured in: Reading Quotes

4. “One best book is equal to hundred good friends but one good friend is equal to a library.”

— Abdul Kalam

5. “Reading is important. If you know how to read then the whole world opens up to you.”

— Barack Obama

Also featured in: Reading Quotes

6. “A book is a dream that you hold in your hands.”

— Neil Gaiman

7. “If you are going to get anywhere in life you have to read a lot of books.”

— Roald Dahl

Also featured in: Reading Quotes

8. “A library is not a luxury but one of the necessities of life.”

— Henry Ward Beecher

Also featured in: Reading Quotes

9. “Sleep is good, he said, And books are better.”

— George R.R. Martin

Also featured in: Reading Quotes, Sleep Quotes, Healing Quotes

10. “A multitude of books distracts the mind.”

— Socrates

Also featured in: Reading Quotes

11. “Books don’t change people; paragraphs do, Sometimes even sentences.”

— John Piper

12. “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

13. “Don’t judge a book by its cover.”

— George Eliot

Also featured in: Judging Quotes

14. “Once I fell in love with books, I fell in love completely.”

— Stephen King

15. “If you want to live a top shelf life then you need to stand on the books you have read. Never stop learning, never stop growing.”

— Jim Rohn

16. “Any book worth banning is a book worth reading.”

— Isaac Asimov

Also featured in: Reading Quotes

17. “Without words, without writing and without books there would be no history, there could be no concept of humanity.”

— Hermann Hesse

18. “Don’t blow off another’s candle for it won’t make yours shine brighter.”

— Jaachynma N.E. Agu

Also featured in: Leadership Quotes, Reading Quotes

19. “I never commit to memory anything that can easily be looked up in a book.”

— Albert Einstein

20. “Give a kid a book, and you change the world. In a way, even the universe.”

— Neil deGrasse Tyson

Also featured in: Quotes About Kids

21. “Some books seem like a key to unfamiliar rooms in one’s own castle.”

— Franz Kafka

22. “I’ll read my books and I’ll drink coffee and I’ll listen to music, and I’ll bolt the door.”

— J.D. Salinger

Also featured in: Coffee Quotes

23. “With freedom, books, flowers, and the moon, who could not be happy?”

— Oscar Wilde

24. “Fill your house with stacks of books, in all the crannies and all the nooks.”

— Dr. Seuss

Also featured in: Reading Quotes

25. “Reading makes a full man, meditation a profound man, discourse a clear man.”

— Benjamin Franklin

Also featured in: Reading Quotes

26. “A book should serve as an axe to the ice inside us.”

— Franz Kafka

27. “I have been a seeker and I still am, but I stopped asking the books and the stars. I started listening to the teaching of my Soul.”

— Rumi

Also featured in: Yoga Quotes

28. “Good books, like good friends, are few and chosen; the more select, the more enjoyable.”

— Louisa May Alcott

29. “I’m a very ordinary human being; I just happen to like reading books.”

— Haruki Murakami

Also featured in: Reading Quotes

30. “Libraries are our friends.”

— Neil Gaiman

Also featured in: Reading Quotes, Thought Provoking Quotes

31. “The new year stands before us, like a chapter in a book, waiting to be written. We can help write that story by setting goals.”

— Melody Beattie

Also featured in: New Year Quotes

32. “You can find magic wherever you look. Sit back and relax, all you need is a book.”

— Dr. Seuss

Also featured in: Reading Quotes

33. “The lesson of the book is that the universe is governed by the laws of science.”

— Stephen Hawking

34. “Without libraries what have we? We have no past and no future.”

— Ray Bradbury

Also featured in: Reading Quotes

35. “Life is like a book that never ends. Chapters close, but not the book itself.”

— Marianne Williamson

36. “If something burns your soul with purpose and desire, it’s your duty to be reduced to ashes by it. Any other form of existence will be yet another dull book in the library of life.”

— Charles Bukowski

Also featured in: Desire Quotes, Soul Quotes

37. “Of all things I liked books best. My father had a large library and whenever I could manage I tried to satisfy my passion for reading.”

— Nikola Tesla

Also featured in: Reading Quotes

38. “If book knowledge made great investors, than the librarians would all be rich.”

— Warren Buffett

39. “Independent inquiry is needed in your search for truth, not dependence on anyone else’s view or a mere book.”

— Bruce Lee

40. “The ink of the scholar is more holy than the blood of the martyr.”

— Anonymous

41. “The world is not in your books and maps, it’s out there.”

— J. R. R. Tolkien

Also featured in: Quotes About the World

42. “Nothing will train you to write better as a writer, than working on your next book.”

— Brandon Sanderson

43. “A man can never have too much red wine, too many books, or too much ammunition.”

— Rudyard Kipling

44. “Books are dead men talking.”

— George R.R. Martin

45. “Happy the people whose annals are blank in the history books!”

— Thomas Carlyle

46. “My alma mater was books, a good library.”

— Malcolm X

47. “Books open your mind, broaden your mind, and strengthen you as nothing else can.”

— William Feather

48. “A lawyer without books would be like a workman without tools.”

— Thomas Jefferson

49. “I beg you, to have patience with everything unresolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves as if they were locked rooms or books written in a very foreign language.”

— Rainer Maria Rilke

50. “An intelligent man is sometimes forced to be drunk to spend time with his fools.”

— Ernest Hemingway