Top 500 Reading Quotes (2026 Update)
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201. “Reading is that fruitful miracle of a communication in the midst of solitude.”

— Marcel Proust

Also featured in: Communication Quotes

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

— Isaac D'Israeli

203. “We live and breathe words.”

— Cassandra Clare

204. “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

Also featured in: Book Quotes

205. “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

206. “I read anything that’s going to be interesting. But you don’t know what it is until you’ve read it. Somewhere in a book on the history of false teeth there’ll be the making of a novel.”

— Terry Pratchett

Also featured in: Book Quotes

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

— Roald Dahl

208. “As a writer reading, I came to realize the obvious: the subject of the dream is the dreamer.”

— Toni Morrison

Also featured in: Book Quotes

209. “Not every book has to be loaded with symbolism, irony, or musical language, but it seems to me that every book-at least every one worth reading-is about something.”

— Stephen King

Also featured in: Book Quotes

210. “Reading is my favourite occupation, when I have leisure for it and books to read.”

— Anne Brontë

211. “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

Also featured in: Book Quotes

212. “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

213. “Constant reading will pull you into a place – a mind-set, if you like the phrase – where you can write eagerly and without self-consciousness.”

— Stephen King

214. “Reading gave me hope.”

— Oprah Winfrey

215. “That is the joy of reading fiction: when all is said and done, the novel belongs to the reader and his or her imagination.”

— Alice Hoffman

216. “Once she knows how to read there’s only one thing you can teach her to believe in and that is herself.”

— Virginia Woolf

217. “Start writing the things that you are reading or that you want to be published doing.”

— Brandon Sanderson

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

— Mario Puzo

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

— Dr. Seuss

Also featured in: Country Quotes

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

— J. C. Ryle

221. “Reading maketh a full man.”

— Francis Bacon

222. “She wasn’t doing a thing that I could see, except standing there leaning on the balcony railing, holding the universe together.”

— J.D. Salinger

223. “Reading the word and learning how to write the word so one can later read it are preceded by learning how to write the world, that is having the experience of changing the world and touching the world.”

— Paulo Freire

224. “I don’t want learning, or dignity, or respectability. I want this music, and this dawn, and the warmth of your cheek against mine.”

— Rumi

225. “The best cure for Christianity is reading the Bible.”

— Mark Twain

226. “It’s important to read because it’s really good for your vocabulary. It’s really good for your imagination. I enjoy reading because I find it relaxing.”

— Emma Watson

227. “Closed in a room, my imagination becomes the universe, and the rest of the world is missing out.”

— Criss Jami

Also featured in: Fun Quotes

228. “To get to where you want to be in the next 5 years, you are either reading the right books or you’re not.”

— Jim Rohn

Also featured in: Book Quotes

229. “In reading some books we occupy ourselves chiefly with the thoughts of the author; in perusing others, exclusively with our own.”

— Edgar Allan Poe

Also featured in: Book Quotes

230. “Even worse than seeing women’s privacy violated on social media is reading the accompanying comments that show such a lack of empathy.”

— Emma Watson

231. “If you actually succeed in creating a utopia, you’ve created a world without conflict, in which everything is perfect. And if there’s no conflict, there are no stories worth telling – or reading!”

— Veronica Roth

232. “The art of reading is to skip judiciously.”

— Alexander Hamilton

233. “When you educate a woman, you set her free. Had I not had books and education in Mississippi, I would have believed that’s all there was.”

— Oprah Winfrey

Also featured in: Book Quotes

234. “My behavior is nonetheless, deplorable. Unfortunately, I’m quite prone to such bouts of deplorability – take for instance, my fondness for reading books at the dinner table.”

— Brandon Sanderson

Also featured in: Book Quotes

235. “In your reading, find books to improve your color sense, your sense of shape and size in the world.”

— Ray Bradbury

Also featured in: Book Quotes

236. “Why are we reading, if not in hope of beauty laid bare, life heightened and its deepest mystery probed?”

— Annie Dillard

237. “If we commit ourselves to reading thus increasing our knowledge, only God limits how far we can go in this world.”

— Ben Carson

238. “I owe everything I am and everything I will ever be to books.”

— Gary Paulsen

239. “I treated Art as the supreme reality and life as a mere mode of fiction.”

— Oscar Wilde

240. “Fake realism is the escapist literature of our time. And probably the ultimate escapist reading is that masterpiece of total unreality, the daily stock market report.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

241. “If I’m engrossed in a book, I have to rearrange my thoughts before I can mingle with other people, because otherwise they might think I was strange.”

— Anne Frank

Also featured in: Book Quotes

242. “Both reading and writing are experiences – lifelong – in the course of which we who encounter words used in certain ways are persuaded by them to be brought mind and heart within the presence, the power, of the imagination.”

— Eudora Welty

243. “I discovered fantasy and science fiction when I was about 10, and read nothing else for about three years. I ran out of all the books that there were to read in the library. I was keen on reading stuff that took me to other places.”

— Terry Pratchett

Also featured in: Book Quotes

244. “Life-transforming ideas have always come to me through books.”

— Bell Hooks

245. “One of the reasons people stop learning is that they become less and less willing to risk failure.”

— John W. Gardner

246. “What would we not give for some great poem to read now, which would be in harmony with the scenery, – for if men read aright, methinks they would never read anything but poems. No history nor philosophy can supply their place.”

— Henry David Thoreau

247. “The fact that people are already reading and loving something I wrote is still hard to believe.”

— Erin Morgenstern

248. “I finally got around to reading the dictionary. Turns out the Zebra did it.”

— Steven Wright

249. “The schizophrenic is drowning in the same waters in which the mystic swims with delight. Edgar Cayce made the same observation in his readings.”

— Joseph Campbell

250. “Today, like every other day, we wake up empty and frightened. Don’t open the door to the study and begin reading. Take down the dulcimer. Let the beauty we love be what we do. There are hundreds of ways to kneel and kiss the ground.”

— Rumi

Also featured in: Inner Peace Quotes, Sufism Quotes