Top 500 Reading Quotes (2025 Update)
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251. “I hope and hoping feeds my pain I weep and weeping feeds my failing heart I laugh but the laughter does not pass within I burn but the burning makes no mark outside.”

— Niccolò Machiavelli

252. “Everybody is a book of blood; wherever we’re opened, we’re red.”

— Clive Barker

253. “The peace of God is with them whose mind and soul are in harmony, who are free from desire and wrath, who know their own soul.”

— Anonymous

254. “I read my books at night, like that, under the quilt with the overheated reading lamp. Reading all those good lines while suffocating. It was magic.”

— Charles Bukowski

255. “Keep reading books, but remember that a book’s only a book, and you should learn to think for yourself.”

— Maxim Gorky

256. “What really knocks me out is a book that, when you’re all done reading it, you wish the author that wrote it was a terrific friend of yours and you could call him up on the phone whenever you felt like it. That doesn’t happen much, though.”

— J.D. Salinger

257. “Well, I can’t describe her exactly-except to say that she was beautiful. She was-tremendously alive.”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

258. “In order to arrive you must follow the signs. God inscribed on the world the path that each man must follow. It is just a matter of reading the inscription He wrote for you.”

— Paulo Coelho

259. “You think of the book you’d most like to be reading, and then you sit down and shamelessly write it.”

— J.D. Salinger

260. “Reading was like a drug, a dope. The novels created moods in which I lived for days.”

— Richard Wright

261. “She didn’t read books so she didn’t know that she was the world and the heavens boiled down to a drop.”

— Zora Neale Hurston

262. “A book lying idle on a shelf is wasted ammunition. Like money, books must be kept in constant circulation. Lend and borrow to the maximum.”

— Henry Miller

263. “If the book we are reading does not wake us, as with a fist hammering on our skull, why then do we read it?”

— Franz Kafka

264. “Reading is merely a surrogate for thinking for yourself; it means letting someone else direct your thoughts.”

— Arthur Schopenhauer

265. “They slipped briskly into an intimacy from which they never recovered.”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

266. “When the saint ceases to seek after holiness, purity, righteousness, truth; when he ceases to pray, stops reading the Word and gives way to carnal appetites, then it is that Satan comes.”

— Smith Wigglesworth

267. “It is with the reading of books the same as with looking at pictures; one must, without doubt, without hesitations, with assurance, admire what is beautiful.”

— Vincent van Gogh

268. “Education begins the gentleman, but reading, good company and reflection must finish him.”

— John Locke

269. “She is too fond of books, and it has turned her brain.”

— Louisa May Alcott

270. “Finally, from so little sleeping and so much reading, his brain dried up and he went completely out of his mind.”

— Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra

271. “Ordinary people simply don’t know what books mean to us, shut up here. Reading, learning, and the radio are our amusements.”

— Anne Frank

272. “In terms of brain development, musical performance is every bit as important educationally as reading or writing.”

— Oliver Sacks

273. “But in reading great literature I become a thousand men and yet remain myself. Like the night sky in the Greek poem, I see with a myriad eyes, but it is still I who see. Here, as in worship, in love, in moral action, and in knowing, I transcend myself; and am never more myself than when I do.”

— C. S. Lewis

274. “Desultory readers are seldom remarkable for the exactness of their learning.”

— Arthur Conan Doyle

275. “A man’s reading program should be as carefully planned as his daily diet, for that too is food, without which he cannot grow mentally.”

— Andrew Carnegie

276. “In reading and writing, you cannot lay down rules until you have learnt to obey them. Much more so in life.”

— Marcus Aurelius

277. “I hope everyone that is reading this is having a really good day.”

— Gillian Anderson

278. “If I’m honest I have to tell you I still read fairy-tales and I like them best of all.”

— Audrey Hepburn

279. “Whether I’m at the office, at home, or on the road, I always have a stack of books I’m looking forward to reading.”

— Bill Gates

280. “A book you finish reading is not the same book it was before you read it.”

— David Mitchell

281. “Understand, I’ll slip quietly away from the noisy crowd when I see the pale stars rising, blooming, over the oaks. I’ll pursue solitary pathways through the pale twilit meadows with only this one dream: You come too.”

— Rainer Maria Rilke

282. “Alcohol makes other people less tedious, and food less bland, and can help provide what the Greeks called entheos, or the slight buzz of inspiration when reading or writing.”

— Christopher Hitchens

283. “Reading about nature is fine, but if a person walks in the woods and listens carefully, he can learn more than what is in books, for they speak with the voice of God.”

— George Washington Carver

284. “Sometimes I think heaven must be one continuous unexhausted reading.”

— Virginia Woolf

285. “By reading so much, my vocabulary automatically improved along with my comprehension.”

— Ben Carson

286. “Good books are the warehouses of ideas.”

— H. G. Wells

287. “Reading is more important than writing.”

— Roberto Bolaño

288. “Reading is an art form, and every man can be an artist.”

— Edwin Louis Cole

289. “Any patch of sunlight in a wood will show you something about the sun which you could never get from reading books on astronomy. These pure and spontaneous pleasures are ‘patches of Godlight’ in the woods of our experience.”

— C. S. Lewis

290. “No matter who you are, no matter where you live, and no matter how many people are chasing you, what you don’t read is often as important as what you do read.”

— Lemony Snicket

291. “Our hope is that the elementary reading of comics will lead to the joy of reading good books.”

— Nelson Mandela

292. “No man can be called friendless who has God and the companionship of good books.”

— Elizabeth Barrett Browning

293. “Reading a book is like re-writing it for yourself.”

— Angela Carter

294. “A peasant that reads is a prince in waiting.”

— Walter Mosley

295. “Read, every day, something no one else is reading. Think, every day, something no one else is thinking.”

— Christopher Morley

296. “I spend a lot of time reading.”

— Bill Gates

297. “When you have mastered numbers, you will in fact no longer be reading numbers, any more than you read words when reading books You will be reading meanings.”

— W. E. B. Du Bois

298. “A book is a device to ignite the imagination.”

— Alan Bennett

299. “You don’t have to care about children to care about children. One of the things that I talk a lot about is the fact of the importance of third-grade reading level. By the end of third grade, if the child is not at reading level, it’ll drop off. They never catch up.”

— Kamala Harris

300. “I thought: pity the poor in spirit who know neither the enchantment nor the beauty of language.”

— Muriel Barbery