Top 500 Reading Quotes (2025 Update)
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101. “In reading, the mind is, in fact, only the playground of another’s thoughts.”

— Arthur Schopenhauer

102. “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

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

— Jorge Luis Borges

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

— Susan Sontag

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

— P. G. Wodehouse

106. “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

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

— Jodi Picoult

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

— Rainer Maria Rilke

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

— Emma Thompson

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

— Norman Cousins

111. “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

112. “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

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

— Jeanette Winterson

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

— Charles Baudelaire

115. “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

116. “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

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

— Mario Vargas Llosa

118. “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

119. “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

120. “Read in order to live.”

— Gustave Flaubert

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

— Jane Austen

122. “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

123. “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

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

— Italo Calvino

125. “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

126. “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

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

— Samuel Johnson

128. “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

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

— Aphra Behn

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

— Ray Bradbury

131. “Libraries are our friends.”

— Neil Gaiman

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

— Lloyd Alexander

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

— Jeannette Walls

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

— Blaise Pascal

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

— Oscar Wilde

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

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

137. “I read in self-defense.”

— Woody Allen

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

— Joseph Joubert

139. “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

140. “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

141. “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

142. “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

143. “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

144. “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

145. “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

146. “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

147. “Reading something from beginning to end. That is reading with love.”

— Gilles Deleuze

148. “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

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

— Judith Butler

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

— Dr. Seuss