Top 500 Reading Quotes (2025 Update)
Page 2 of 10

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

— Marcus Aurelius

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

— Pablo Picasso

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

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

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

— Victor Hugo

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

— Isaac Asimov

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

— Rudyard Kipling

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

— Roald Dahl

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. “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

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

— Edmund Burke

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

— Kate DiCamillo

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

— Samuel Johnson

68. “We live for books.”

— Umberto Eco

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

— William Styron

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

— Arthur C. Clarke

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

— Benjamin Franklin

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

— Paulo Freire

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

— Arthur Schopenhauer

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

— Aldous Huxley

75. “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

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

— Saul Bellow

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

— Arthur Conan Doyle

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

— Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

79. “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

80. “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

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

— Margaret Atwood

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

— Jorge Luis Borges

83. “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

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

— Marcel Proust

85. “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

86. “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

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

— Mortimer J. Adler

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

— Billy Graham

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

— Henry David Thoreau

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

— John Ruskin

91. “We may sit in our library and yet be in all quarters of the earth.”

— John Lubbock

92. “You cannot open a book without learning something.”

— Confucius

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

— Ray Bradbury

94. “You must feed your mind with reading material, thoughts, and ideas that open you to new possibilities.”

— Oprah Winfrey

95. “Reading makes all other learning possible. We have to get books into our children’s hands early and often.”

— Barack Obama

96. “Reading forces you to be quiet in a world that no longer makes place for that.”

— John Green

97. “I ransack public libraries, and find them full of sunk treasure.”

— Virginia Woolf

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

— Karl Marx

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

— Daniel J. Boorstin

100. “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