Top 500 Reading Quotes (2025 Update)
Page 5 of 10

201. “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

202. “Reading maketh a full man.”

— Francis Bacon

203. “Write your own book instead of reading someone else’s book about success.”

— Herb Brooks

204. “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

205. “Reading is a conversation. All books talk. But a good book listens as well.”

— Mark Haddon

206. “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

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

— Mark Twain

208. “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

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

— Criss Jami

210. “Sit in a room and read – and read and read. And read the right books by the right people. Your mind is brought onto that level, and you have a nice, mild, slow-burning rapture all the time.”

— Joseph Campbell

211. “True teaching cannot be learned from text-books any more than a surgeon can acquire his skill by reading about surgery.”

— Helen Keller

212. “Reading is that fruitful miracle of a communication in the midst of solitude.”

— Marcel Proust

213. “We live and breathe words.”

— Cassandra Clare

214. “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

215. “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

216. “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

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

— Edgar Allan Poe

218. “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

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

— Alexander Hamilton

220. “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

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

— Toni Morrison

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

— Ray Bradbury

223. “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

224. “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

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

— Anne Brontë

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

— Annie Dillard

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

— Ben Carson

228. “Books were my pass to personal freedom.”

— Oprah Winfrey

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

— Gary Paulsen

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

— Oscar Wilde

231. “Reading nurtures the soul, and an enlightened friend brings it solace.”

— Voltaire

232. “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

233. “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

234. “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

235. “Books can truly change our lives: the lives of those who read them, the lives of those who write them. Readers and writers alike discover things they never knew about the world and about themselves.”

— Lloyd Alexander

236. “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

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

— Bell Hooks

238. “Literature is news that stays news.”

— Ezra Pound

239. “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

240. “Reading gave me hope.”

— Oprah Winfrey

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

— John W. Gardner

242. “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

243. “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

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

— Virginia Woolf

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

— Brandon Sanderson

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

— Erin Morgenstern

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

— Steven Wright

248. “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

249. “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

250. “God has a purpose behind every problem. He uses circumstances to develop our character. In fact, he depends more on circumstances to make us like Jesus than he depends on our reading the Bible.”

— Rick Warren