Top 500 Reading Quotes (2025 Update)
Page 4 of 10

151. “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

152. “If you want to get laid, go to college. If you want an education, go to the library.”

— Frank Zappa

153. “You learn best by reading a lot and writing a lot, and the most valuable lessons of all are the ones you teach yourself.”

— Stephen King

154. “The reading of all good books is indeed like a conversation with the noblest men of past centuries who were the authors of them, nay a carefully studied conversation, in which they reveal to us none but the best of their thoughts.”

— René Descartes

155. “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

156. “We never tire of the friendships we form with books.”

— Charles Dickens

157. “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

158. “Reading is important – read between the lines. Don’t swallow everything.”

— Gwendolyn Brooks

159. “Writing and reading decrease our sense of isolation. They deepen and widen and expand our sense of life: they feed the soul.”

— Anne Lamott

160. “Writing and reading decrease our sense of isolation. It’s like singing on a boat during a terrible storm at sea. You can’t stop the raging storm, but singing can change the hearts and spirits of the people who are together on that ship.”

— Anne Lamott

161. “In books I have traveled, not only to other worlds but into my own. I learned who I was and who I wanted to be, what I might aspire to, and what I might dare to dream about my world and myself.”

— Anna Quindlen

162. “A well-read woman is a dangerous creature.”

— Lisa Kleypas

163. “This week I’ve been reading a lot and doing little work. That’s the way things ought to be. That’s surely the road to success.”

— Anne Frank

164. “To read a writer is for me not merely to get an idea of what he says, but to go off with him and travel in his company.”

— André Gide

165. “I love to read. I wish I could advise more people to read. There’s a whole new world in books. If you can’t afford to travel, you travel mentally through reading. You can see anything and go any place you want to in reading.”

— Michael Jackson

166. “Librarians are tour-guides for all of knowledge.”

— Patrick Ness

167. “I guess there are never enough books.”

— John Steinbeck

168. “Somebody’s boring me. I think it’s me.”

— Dylan Thomas

169. “Easy reading is damn hard writing.”

— Nathaniel Hawthorne

170. “A writer only begins a book. A reader finishes it.”

— Samuel Johnson

171. “It sounds so geeky, but I really do like studying and reading, and if I’m not working on ‘Harry Potter,’ then my greatest relaxation is to sit with a book.”

— Emma Watson

172. “Reading in bed can be heaven, assuming you can get just the right amount of light on the page and aren’t prone to spilling your coffee or cognac on the sheets.”

— Stephen King

173. “Easy writing makes hard reading.”

— Ernest Hemingway

174. “Literature is my Utopia.”

— Helen Keller

175. “The delights of reading impart the vivacity of youth even to old age.”

— Isaac D'Israeli

176. “I want to urge you very strongly to travel as much as you can, and to evolve yourself as an internationalist. It’s as important a part of your education as a radical as the reading of any book.”

— Christopher Hitchens

177. “A book, too, can be a star, a living fire to lighten the darkness, leading out into the expanding universe.”

— Madeleine L'Engle

178. “I don’t want people to think that they can attain realization simply by listening to others or by reading books. They must practice what they read and hear.”

— Paramahansa Yogananda

179. “So maybe part of our formal education should be training in empathy. Imagine how different the world would be if, in fact, that were ‘reading, writing, arithmetic, empathy.’”

— Neil deGrasse Tyson

180. “A bookstore is one of the only pieces of evidence we have that people are still thinking.”

— Jerry Seinfeld

181. “Oh! I am delighted with the book! I should like to spend my whole life in reading it.”

— Jane Austen

182. “Some books are so familiar that reading them is like being home again.”

— Louisa May Alcott

183. “Reading is the way out of ignorance, and the road to achievement.”

— Ben Carson

184. “Novels aren’t just happy escapes; they are slivers of people’s souls, nailed to the pages, dripping ink from veins of wood pulp. Reading the right one at the right time can make all the difference.”

— Brandon Sanderson

185. “Wherever they burn books they will also, in the end, burn human beings.”

— Heinrich Heine

186. “I guess that’s the beauty of books. When they finish they don’t really finish.”

— Markus Zusak

187. “Reading is escape, and the opposite of escape.”

— Nora Ephron

188. “I was reading the dictionary. I thought it was a poem about everything.”

— Steven Wright

189. “All the reading she had done had given her a view of life that they had never seen.”

— Roald Dahl

190. “She was fascinated with words. To her, words were things of beauty, each like a magical powder or potion that could be combined with other words to create powerful spells.”

— Dean Koontz

191. “Of all things, I liked books best.”

— Nikola Tesla

192. “The simplest way to make sure that we raise literate children is to teach them to read, and to show them that reading is a pleasurable activity.”

— Neil Gaiman

193. “E-books are great for instant gratification – you see a review somewhere of a book that interests you, and you can start reading it five minutes later.”

— Anne Lamott

194. “I still love the book-ness of books, the smell of books: I am a book fetishist – books to me are the coolest and sexiest and most wonderful things there are.”

— Neil Gaiman

195. “We read in bed because reading is halfway between life and dreaming, our own consciousness in someone else’s mind.”

— Anna Quindlen

196. “Children start off reading in books about lions and giraffes and so on, but they also-if theyre lucky enough and have reasonable privileges of any human being-are able to go into a garden and turn over stone and see a worm and see a slug and see an ant.”

— David Attenborough

197. “The great thing about reading is that it broadens your life.”

— George R.R. Martin

198. “I find the only thing that really stands up, better than gambling, better than booze, better than women, is reading.”

— Mario Puzo

199. “Children’s reading and children’s thinking are the rock-bottom base upon which this country will rise.”

— Dr. Seuss

200. “Let us seek friends that will stir up our prayers, our Bible reading, our use of time, and our salvation.”

— J. C. Ryle