Top 500 Book Quotes (2024 Update)
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51. “We read books to find out who we are.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

52. “A man is known by the books he reads.”

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

53. “Books are the best friends you can have; they inform you, and entertain you, and they don’t talk back.”

— John Steinbeck

54. “Be a life long student, read as many books as possible.”

— Nelson Mandela

55. “Every reader, if he has a strong mind, reads himself into the book, and amalgamates his thoughts with those of the author.”

— Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

56. “The reading of all good books is indeed like a conversation with the noblest men of past centuries who were the authors of them, nay a carefully studied conversation, in which they reveal to us none but the best of their thoughts.”

— René Descartes

57. “I love to read. I wish I could advise more people to read. There’s a whole new world in books. If you can’t afford to travel, you travel mentally through reading. You can see anything and go any place you want to in reading.”

— Michael Jackson

58. “There comes a point in your life when you need to stop reading other people’s books and write your own.”

— Albert Einstein

59. “Never let a day pass without looking at some perfect work of art, hearing some great piece of music and reading, in part, some great book.”

— Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

60. “A writer never finds the time to write. A writer makes it. If you don’t have the drive, the discipline, and the desire, then you can have all the talent in the world, and you aren’t going to finish a book.”

— Nora Roberts

61. “My books are friends that never fail me.”

— Thomas Carlyle

62. “If you want to get laid, go to college. If you want an education, go to the library.”

— Frank Zappa

63. “Prejudice is opinion without judgement.”

— Voltaire

64. “I guess there are never enough books.”

— John Steinbeck

65. “If I finish a book a week, I will read only a few thousand books in my lifetime, about a tenth of a percent of the contents of the greatest libraries of our time. The trick is to know which books to read.”

— Carl Sagan

66. “The Book of Mormon changes lives.”

— Thomas S. Monson

67. “Knowing you have something good to read before bed is among the most pleasurable of sensations.”

— Vladimir Nabokov

68. “We live for books.”

— Umberto Eco

69. “Life is too short to read a bad book.”

— James Joyce

70. “With books we stand on the shoulders of giants.”

— John Locke

71. “Great books write themselves, only bad books have to be written.”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

72. “This year, more people will use cocaine than will read a book to their children.”

— Michael Scott

73. “The best fashion accessory is a book.”

— Vivienne Westwood

74. “Don’t judge me by the cover, ’cause I’m a real good book.”

— Dolly Parton

75. “Curiously enough, one cannot read a book; one can only reread it. A good reader, a major reader, and active and creative reader is a rereader.”

— Vladimir Nabokov

76. “We need the books that affect us like a disaster, that grieve us deeply, like the death of someone we loved more than ourselves, like being banished into forests far from everyone, like a suicide. A book must be the axe for the frozen sea inside us.”

— Franz Kafka

77. “I think we ought to read only the kind of books that wound and stab us.”

— Franz Kafka

78. “Somebody’s boring me. I think it’s me.”

— Dylan Thomas

79. “JK Rowling created seven Horcruxes. She put a part of her soul in every book and now her books will live forever.”

— Stephen King

80. “There’s so much more to the book than the page you were stuck on.”

— Zayn Malik

81. “No one who can read, ever looks at a book, even unopened on a shelf, like one who cannot.”

— Charles Dickens

82. “The true university of these days is a collection of books.”

— Thomas Carlyle

83. “No printed word, nor spoken plea can teach young minds what they should be. Not all the books on all the shelves – but what the teachers are themselves.”

— Rudyard Kipling

84. “Perhaps there are none more lazy, or more truly ignorant, than your everlasting readers.”

— Marcus Aurelius

85. “Whatever we put out, it’s coming back to us. The universe keeps a perfect set of books.”

— Marianne Williamson

86. “Anyone who can only think of one way to spell a word obviously lacks imagination.”

— Mark Twain

87. “Librarians are tour-guides for all of knowledge.”

— Patrick Ness

88. “If you read one hour per day in your field, that will translate into about one book per week. One book per week translates into about 50 books per year. 50 books per year will translate into about 500 books over the next ten years.”

— Brian Tracy

89. “Thinking. This book contains some. Whether you try it at home is up to you.”

— Terry Pratchett

90. “I had a couple of friends, but I was mostly the kid with his nose in a book.”

— George R.R. Martin

91. “A new book is like a friend that I have yet to meet.”

— Abraham Lincoln

92. “Books must be treated with respect, we feel that in our bones, because words have power. Bring enough words together they can bend space and time.”

— Terry Pratchett

93. “The best leaders are the most dedicated learners. Read great books daily.”

— Robin S. Sharma

94. “When I first thought about writing the book Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, I never originally meant to have children in it at all!”

— Roald Dahl

95. “It is a far, far better thing that I do, than I have ever done; it is a far, far better rest that I go to, than I have ever known.”

— Charles Dickens

96. “I do things differently, because I don’t go by a rule book, because I lead from the heart, not the head, and albeit that’s got me into trouble in my work, I understand that.”

— Princess Diana

97. “I don’t give a damn for a man that can only spell a word one way.”

— Mark Twain

98. “All modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn.”

— Ernest Hemingway

99. “I conceive a knowledge of books is the basis upon which other knowledge is to be built.”

— George Washington

100. “The remedy for life’s broken pieces is not classes, workshops or books. Don’t try to heal the broken pieces. Just forgive.”

— Iyanla Vanzant