Top 500 Reading Quotes (2024 Update)
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51. “Perhaps there are none more lazy, or more truly ignorant, than your everlasting readers.”

— Marcus Aurelius

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

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

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

— Isaac Asimov

54. “People who read are people who dream.”

— Pablo Picasso

55. “To learn to read is to light a fire; every syllable that is spelled out is a spark.”

— Victor Hugo

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

— Roald Dahl

57. “Words are, of course, the most powerful drug used by mankind.”

— Rudyard Kipling

58. “Reading is by far the most successful pursuit of happiness.”

— John Grisham

59. “No matter how busy you may think you are, you must find time for reading, or surrender yourself to self-chosen ignorance.”

— Confucius

60. “Everything which is good in me should be credited to books.”

— Maxim Gorky

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

— Albert Einstein

62. “I believe that reading and writing are the most nourishing forms of meditation anyone has so far found. By reading the writings of the most interesting minds in history, we meditate with our own minds and theirs as well. This to me is a miracle.”

— Kurt Vonnegut

63. “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

64. “We live for books.”

— Umberto Eco

65. “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

66. “To read without reflecting is like eating without digesting.”

— Edmund Burke

67. “You can never be wise unless you love reading.”

— Samuel Johnson

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

— Benjamin Franklin

69. “Reading should not be presented to children as a chore or duty. It should be offered to them as a precious gift.”

— Kate DiCamillo

70. “A well-stocked mind is safe from boredom.”

— Arthur C. Clarke

71. “Literature is the safe and traditional vehicle through which we learn about the world and pass on values from on generation to the next. Books save lives.”

— Laurie Anderson

72. “The proper study of mankind is books.”

— Aldous Huxley

73. “Reading is not walking on the words; it’s grasping the soul of them.”

— Paulo Freire

74. “To buy books would be a good thing if we also could buy the time to read them.”

— Arthur Schopenhauer

75. “A great book should leave you with many experiences, and slightly exhausted at the end. You live several lives while reading.”

— William Styron

76. “People can lose their lives in libraries. They ought to be warned.”

— Saul Bellow

77. “The way to chastity is not to struggle directly with incontinent thoughts but to avert the thoughts by some imployment, or by reading, or meditating on other things.”

— Isaac Newton

78. “The answers you get from literature depend on the questions you pose.”

— Margaret Atwood

79. “There is no scent so pleasant to my nostrils as that faint, subtle reek which comes from an ancient book.”

— Arthur Conan Doyle

80. “The decline of literature indicates the decline of a nation.”

— Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

81. “I think of reading a book as no less an experience than travelling or falling in love.”

— Jorge Luis Borges

82. “The most important thing whenever we’re connecting kids to books, is that we try to match the book to the kid and make sure that reading is a fun, rewarding experience outside the classroom.”

— Rick Riordan

83. “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

84. “So Matilda’s strong young mind continued to grow, nurtured by the voices of all those authors who had sent their books out into the world like ships on the sea. These books gave Matilda a hopeful and comforting message: You are not alone.”

— Roald Dahl

85. “I am never lonely when I am reading the Bible. Nothing dissolves loneliness like a session with God’s Word.”

— Billy Graham

86. “There are perhaps no days of our childhood we lived so fully as those we spent with a favorite book.”

— Marcel Proust

87. “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

88. “Reading is a basic tool in the living of a good life.”

— Mortimer J. Adler

89. “By reading we discover our world, our history, and ourselves.”

— Daniel J. Boorstin

90. “I am a machine condemned to devour books.”

— Karl Marx

91. “I am reading six books at once, the only way of reading; since, as you will agree, one book is only a single unaccompanied note, and to get the full sound, one needs ten others at the same time.”

— Virginia Woolf

92. “I cannot sleep unless I am surrounded by books.”

— Jorge Luis Borges

93. “Every reader finds himself. The writer’s work is merely a kind of optical instrument that makes it possible for the reader to discern what, without this book, he would perhaps never have seen in himself.”

— Marcel Proust

94. “There is no surer foundation for a beautiful friendship than a mutual taste in literature.”

— P. G. Wodehouse

95. “The Library is a wilderness of books.”

— Henry David Thoreau

96. “My library is an archive of longings.”

— Susan Sontag

97. “A book worth reading is worth buying.”

— John Ruskin

98. “The truth of the matter is that about 99 percent of teaching is making the students feel interestedin the material. Then the other 1 percent has to do with your methods. And that’s not just true of languages. It’s true of every subject.”

— Noam Chomsky

99. “Ah, how good it is to be among people who are reading!”

— Rainer Maria Rilke

100. “A library is the delivery room for the birth of ideas, a place where history comes to life.”

— Norman Cousins