Top 100 Quotes About Books And Reading (2025 Update)

1. “Today a reader, tomorrow a leader.”

— Margaret Fuller

Also featured in: Inspirational Quotes, Leadership Quotes, Learning Quotes, Teacher Quotes

2. “There is no friend as loyal as a book.”

— Ernest Hemingway

Also featured in: Reflection Quotes

3. “If you only read the books that everyone else is reading, you can only think what everyone else is thinking.”

— Haruki Murakami

Also featured in: Creativity Quotes, Deep Quotes, Important Quotes

4. “A room without books is like a body without a soul.”

— Marcus Tullius Cicero

Also featured in: Study Quotes, Quality Quotes, Knowledge Quotes, Wise Quotes

5. “So many books, so little time.”

— Frank Zappa

Also featured in: Time Quotes, Short Quotes, Life Is Short Quotes, Humor Quotes

6. “Good books don't give up all their secrets at once.”

— Stephen King

Also featured in: Storytelling Quotes

7. “A mind needs books as a sword needs a whetstone, if it is to keep its edge.”

— George R.R. Martin

Also featured in: Mind Quotes, Knowledge Quotes

8. “Books are a uniquely portable magic.”

— Stephen King

Also featured in: Fiction Quotes, Beautiful Quotes, Important Quotes

9. “Never trust anyone who has not brought a book with them.”

— Lemony Snicket

Also featured in: Fiction Quotes

10. “I cannot live without books.”

— Thomas Jefferson

Also featured in: Study Quotes, Values Quotes, Knowledge Quotes

11. “Books are the perfect entertainment: no commercials, no batteries, hours of enjoyment for each dollar spent. What I wonder is why everybody doesn’t carry a book around for those inevitable dead spots in life.”

— Stephen King

12. “I find television very educating. Every time somebody turns on the set, I go into the other room and read a book.”

— Groucho Marx

Also featured in: Funny Quotes, Crazy Quotes, Clever Quotes, Funny Work Quotes

13. “Some books should be tasted, some devoured, but only a few should be chewed and digested thoroughly.”

— Francis Bacon

Also featured in: Famous Quotes, Knowledge Quotes

14. “I can't imagine a man really enjoying a book and reading it only once.”

— C. S. Lewis

Also featured in: Fiction Quotes

15. “Reading furnishes the mind only with materials of knowledge; it is thinking that makes what we read ours.”

— John Locke

Also featured in: Education Quotes, Knowledge Quotes

16. “So, please, oh please, we beg, we pray, go throw your TV set away, and in its place you can install, a lovely bookcase on the wall.”

— Roald Dahl

Also featured in: Fiction Quotes, Silly Quotes, Witty Quotes

17. “Reading one book is like eating one potato chip.”

— Diane Duane

Also featured in: Clever Quotes

18. “I am too fond of reading books to care to write them.”

— Oscar Wilde

Also featured in: Silly Quotes, Witty Quotes

19. “In a good bookroom you feel in some mysterious way that you are absorbing the wisdom contained in all the books through your skin, without even opening them.”

— Mark Twain

Also featured in: Library Quotes

20. “My alma mater was books, a good library. I could spend the rest of my life reading, just satisfying my curiosity.”

— Malcolm X

Also featured in: Study Quotes, Knowledge Quotes, Curiosity Quotes

21. “Many people, myself among them, feel better at the mere sight of a book.”

— Jane Smiley

22. “I declare after all there is no enjoyment like reading. How much sooner one tires of any thing than of a book.”

— Jane Austen

Also featured in: Interesting Quotes, Quality Quotes, Smart Quotes, Culture Quotes

23. “Books are the plane, and the train, and the road. They are the destination, and the journey. They are home.”

— Anna Quindlen

Also featured in: Journey Quotes, Storytelling Quotes, Reading Quotes

24. “I lived in books more than I lived anywhere else.”

— Neil Gaiman

Also featured in: Storytelling Quotes

25. “We live for books.”

— Umberto Eco

Also featured in: Culture Quotes, Book Quotes, Reading Quotes

26. “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

Also featured in: Storytelling Quotes, Imagination Quotes, Quotes About Giving, Joy Quotes

27. “A reader lives a thousand lives before he dies. The man who never reads lives only once.”

— George R.R. Martin

Also featured in: Fiction Quotes, Quality Quotes, Thought Provoking Quotes, Meaning of Life Quotes

28. “I have a passion for teaching kids to become readers, to become comfortable with a book, not daunted. Books shouldn’t be daunting, they should be funny, exciting and wonderful; and learning to be a reader gives a terrific advantage.”

— Roald Dahl

Also featured in: Education Quotes, Encouraging Quotes for Students, Book Quotes, Teaching Quotes

29. “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

Also featured in: Lifelong Learning Quotes, Curiosity Quotes, Reading Quotes

30. “Books showed me there were possibilities in life, that there were actually people like me living in a world I could not only aspire to but attain. Reading gave me hope. For me, it was the open door.”

— Oprah Winfrey

Also featured in: Inspirational Quotes for Women, Lifelong Learning Quotes, Quotes About Hope

31. “I have often reflected upon the new vistas that reading has opened to me. I knew right there in prison that reading had changed forever the course of my life. As I see it today, the ability to read awoke inside me some long dormant craving to be mentally alive.”

— Malcolm X

Also featured in: Education Quotes, Lifelong Learning Quotes, Reading Quotes

32. “The more that you read, the more things you will know. The more that you learn, the more places you’ll go.”

— Dr. Seuss

Also featured in: Positive Quotes, Education Quotes, Positive Life Quotes, Study Quotes

33. “Some day you will be old enough to start reading fairy tales again.”

— C. S. Lewis

Also featured in: Life Quotes, Storytelling Quotes

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

— Neil Gaiman

Also featured in: Creativity Quotes, Interesting Quotes, Fiction Quotes, Quotes About Dreams

35. “If you don’t like to read, you haven’t found the right book.”

— J.K. Rowling

Also featured in: Fiction Quotes, Encouraging Quotes for Students, Knowledge Quotes, Clever Quotes

36. “A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us.”

— Franz Kafka

Also featured in: Emotional Quotes, Existentialism Quotes

37. “If you don’t have time to read, you don’t have the time (or the tools) to write. Simple as that.”

— Stephen King

Also featured in: Quotes About Writing, Creative Quotes

38. “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

Also featured in: Time Quotes, Book Quotes

39. “I have always imagined that Paradise will be a kind of library.”

— Jorge Luis Borges

Also featured in: Reflection Quotes, Knowledge Quotes, Culture Quotes, Library Quotes

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

— Dr. Seuss

Also featured in: Creativity Quotes, Cute Quotes, Sunday Quotes, Joy Quotes

41. “Reading is the gateway skill that makes all other learning possible.”

— Barack Obama

Also featured in: Study Quotes, Opportunity Quotes, Encouraging Quotes for Students

42. “Reading is the key that opens doors to many good things in life. Reading shaped my dreams, and more reading helped me make my dreams come true.”

— Ruth Bader Ginsburg

Also featured in: Learning Quotes, Lifelong Learning Quotes, Important Quotes, Reading Quotes

43. “You don’t have to burn books to destroy a culture. Just get people to stop reading them.”

— Ray Bradbury

Also featured in: Knowledge Quotes, Culture Quotes

44. “You can never get a cup of tea large enough or a book long enough to suit me.”

— C. S. Lewis

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

— Dr. Seuss

Also featured in: Silly Quotes, Book Quotes, Reading Quotes

46. “Sometimes, you read a book and it fills you with this weird evangelical zeal, and you become convinced that the shattered world will never be put back together unless and until all living humans read the book.”

— John Green

Also featured in: Changing the World Quotes

47. “I think it’s the books that you read when you’re young that live with you forever.”

— J.K. Rowling

Also featured in: Storytelling Quotes, Reading Quotes, Quotes About Kids

48. “Writing is perhaps the greatest of human inventions, binding together people who never knew each other, citizens of distant epochs. Books break the shackles of time. A book is proof that humans are capable of magic.”

— Carl Sagan

Also featured in: Creative Quotes, Culture Quotes, Book Quotes

49. “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

Also featured in: Cute Quotes, Appreciation Quotes, Clever Quotes, Different Quotes

50. “If you’re not reading – with your heart as well as your brain – you will be one stupid grown up. Even worse, you’ll be missing out on one of the best experiences you can possibly have. Nowhere will you meet more interesting people than in books.”

— James Patterson

Also featured in: Reading Quotes