Top 500 Reading Quotes (2026 Update)
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251. “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

252. “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

Also featured in: Quotes About Laughter

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

— Clive Barker

254. “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

255. “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

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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

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257. “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

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

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

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

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

— Richard Wright

261. “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

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262. “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

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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

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264. “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

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

— John Locke

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

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

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

— Arthur Schopenhauer

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

— Oliver Sacks

270. “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

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271. “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

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

— Louisa May Alcott

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

— Anne Frank

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

— Marcus Aurelius

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

— Gillian Anderson

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

— Arthur Conan Doyle

277. “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

278. “Back to culture. Yes, actually to culture. You can’t consume much if you sit still and read books.”

— Aldous Huxley

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

— Audrey Hepburn

280. “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

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

— David Mitchell

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

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

— H. G. Wells

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

— Edwin Louis Cole

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

— Virginia Woolf

287. “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

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

— Ben Carson

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

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

— Elizabeth Barrett Browning

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291. “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

292. “Reading is more important than writing.”

— Roberto Bolaño

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

— Angela Carter

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

— Nelson Mandela

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

— Walter Mosley

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

— Christopher Morley

297. “I spend a lot of time reading.”

— Bill Gates

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

— Alan Bennett

299. “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

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300. “Margarine? That’s not food. I Can’t Believe It’s Not Butter? I can. If you’re planning on using margarine in anything, you can stop reading now, because I won’t be able to help you.”

— Anthony Bourdain