Top 500 Reading Quotes (2024 Update)
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101. “We may sit in our library and yet be in all quarters of the earth.”

— John Lubbock

102. “I’ve been reading the books. It’s the origination, it’s the primary source. You should always go back to the books.”

— Benedict Cumberbatch

103. “A book is a garden, an orchard, a storehouse, a party, a company by the way, a counselor, a multitude of counselors.”

— Charles Baudelaire

104. “A good book is the precious life-blood of a master-spirit, embalmed and treasured up on purpose to a life beyond life, and as such it must surely be a necessary commodity.”

— Penelope Fitzgerald

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

— Ray Bradbury

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

— Oprah Winfrey

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

— Virginia Woolf

108. “In reading, the mind is, in fact, only the playground of another’s thoughts.”

— Arthur Schopenhauer

109. “The act of reading is a partnership. The author builds a house, but the reader makes it a home.”

— Jodi Picoult

110. “A fondness for reading, properly directed, must be an education in itself.”

— Jane Austen

111. “I think books are like people, in the sense that they’ll turn up in your life when you most need them.”

— Emma Thompson

112. “Books are to be called for and supplied on the assumption that the process of reading is not a half-sleep, but in the highest sense an exercise, a gymnastic struggle; that the reader is to do something for himself.”

— Walt Whitman

113. “To look at the paper is to raise a seashell to one’s ear and to be overwhelmed by the roar of humanity.”

— Alain de Botton

114. “Reading to children at night, responding to their smiles with a smile, returning their vocalizations with one of your own, touching them, holding them – all of these further a child’s brain development and future potential, even in the earliest months.”

— T. Berry Brazelton

115. “Reading is a rendezvous with your soul.”

— Jeanette Winterson

116. “The imaginary is not formed in opposition to reality as its denial or compensation; it grows among signs, from book to book, in the interstice of repetitions and commentaries; it is born and takes shape in the interval between books. It is the phenomena of the library.”

— Michel Foucault

117. “Of course anyone who truly loves books buys more of them than he or she can hope to read in one fleeting lifetime. A good book, resting unopened in its slot on a shelf, full of majestic potentiality, is the most comforting sort of intellectual wallpaper.”

— David Quammen

118. “Reading is a protest against the insufficiencies of life.”

— Mario Vargas Llosa

119. “Books should go where they will be most appreciated, and not sit unread, gathering dust on a forgotten shelf, don’t you agree?”

— Christopher Paolini

120. “That perfect tranquility of life, which is nowhere to be found but in retreat, a faithful friend and a good library.”

— Aphra Behn

121. “Books are the most mannerly of companions, accessible at all times, in all moods, frankly declaring the author’s mind, without offense.”

— Amos Bronson Alcott

122. “Reading is at the center of our lives. The library is our brain. Without the library, you have no civilization.”

— Ray Bradbury

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

— Barack Obama

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

— John Green

125. “One benefit of Summer was that each day we had more light to read by.”

— Jeannette Walls

126. “So it is with children who learn to read fluently and well: They begin to take flight into whole new worlds as effortlessly as young birds take to the sky.”

— William James

127. “Read in order to live.”

— Gustave Flaubert

128. “The imagination imitates. It is the critical spirit that creates.”

— Oscar Wilde

129. “A classic is a book which with each rereading offers as much of a sense of discovery as the first reading.”

— Italo Calvino

130. “The only end of writing is to enable readers better to enjoy life or better to endure it.”

— Samuel Johnson

131. “There is creative reading as well as creative writing.”

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

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

— Confucius

133. “Oh! it is absurd to have a hard-and-fast rule about what one should read and what one shouldn’t. More than half of modern culture depends on what one shouldn’t read.”

— Oscar Wilde

134. “Books, for me, are a home. Books don’t make a home – they are one, in the sense that just as you do with a door, you open a book, and you go inside. Inside there is a different kind of time and a different kind of space.”

— Jeanette Winterson

135. “Reading, like writing, is a creative act. If readers only bring a narrow range of themselves to the book, then they’ll only see their narrow range reflected in it.”

— Ben Okri

136. “Libraries are our friends.”

— Neil Gaiman

137. “When we read too fast or too slowly, we understand nothing.”

— Blaise Pascal

138. “I read in self-defense.”

— Woody Allen

139. “The fun of reading as “an exchange between consciousnesses, a way for human beings to talk to each other about stuff we can’t normally talk about.””

— David Foster Wallace

140. “The worst thing about new books is that they keep us from reading the old ones.”

— Joseph Joubert

141. “We lose ourselves in what we read, only to return to ourselves, transformed and part of a more expansive world.”

— Judith Butler

142. “A book, I was taught long ago in English class, is a living and breathing document that grows richer with each new reading.”

— Malcolm Gladwell

143. “The most important habit is solitude, quiet time. People who enter their day by taking 45 minutes or an hour for themselves – meditation, prayer, inspirational reading, taking a walk – before they go for it in the real world do best.”

— Kenneth H. Blanchard

144. “We are the Bibles the world is reading; We are the creeds the world is needing; We are the sermons the world is heeding.”

— Billy Graham

145. “Keep reading. It’s one of the most marvelous adventures that anyone can have.”

— Lloyd Alexander

146. “I love reading about history. Sometimes, I feel I was born in the wrong era. There was more creativity in the air when people were still discovering new worlds.”

— Shakira

147. “It is impossible to enslave, mentally or socially, a bible-reading people. The principles of the bible are the groundwork of human freedom.”

— Horace Greeley

148. “There are three kinds of men. The one that learns by reading. The few who learn by observation. The rest of them have to pee on the electric fence for themselves.”

— Will Rogers

149. “Most people do not listen with the intent to understand; they listen with the intent to reply. They’re either speaking or preparing to speak. They’re filtering everything through their own paradigms, reading their autobiography into other people’s lives.”

— Stephen R. Covey

150. “Well meaning adults can easily destroy a child’s love of reading – do not discourage children from reading because you feel they’re reading the wrong thing. There is no such thing as the wrong thing to be reading and no bad fiction for kids.”

— Neil Gaiman