Top 500 Reading Quotes (2025 Update)
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301. “She liked to sit on the front porch in the afternoons and read books she’d checked out from the library. Aside from coffee, reading was her only indulgence.”

— Nicholas Sparks

302. “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

303. “Secrets of Closing the Sale, is essential reading. Ziglar tells us that selling and closing are not mysteries to be solved; instead they are as tangible as when his wife up-sold him on a new house.”

— Zig Ziglar

304. “Books are meat and medicine and flame and flight and flower steel, stitch, cloud and clout, and drumbeats on the air.”

— Gwendolyn Brooks

305. “Reading was my escape and my comfort, my consolation, my stimulant of choice: reading for the pure pleasure of it, for the beautiful stillness that surrounds you when you hear an author’s words reverberating in your head.”

— Paul Auster

306. “While we are reading, we are all Don Quixote.”

— Mason Cooley

307. “I love reading people. I really enjoy watching, observing, and being able to figure out a person, the reason they wore that dress, the reason they smell the way they do.”

— Rihanna

308. “When you read with your child, you show them that reading is important, but you also show them they’re important – that they are so important to you that you will spend 20 minutes a day with your arm around them.”

— Laura Bush

309. “We must form our minds by reading deep rather than wide.”

— Quintilian

310. “My education was neglected, yet I was passionately fond of reading.”

— Mary Shelley

311. “It was amazing how many books one could fit into a room, assuming one didn’t want to move around very much.”

— Brandon Sanderson

312. “Reading inspirational and motivational quotes daily is like taking my vitamins.”

— Rosanne Cash

313. “A reading man and woman is a ready man and woman, but a writing man and woman is exact.”

— Marcus Garvey

314. “You should write because you love the shape of stories and sentences and the creation of different words on a page. Writing comes from reading, and reading is the finest teacher of how to write.”

— Annie Proulx

315. “I’m wondering what to read next.”

— Roald Dahl

316. “We never stop reading, although every book comes to an end, just as we never stop living, although death is certain.”

— Roberto Bolaño

317. “I grew up kissing books and bread.”

— Salman Rushdie

318. “It was a joy! Words weren’t dull, words were things that could make your mind hum. If you read them and let yourself feel the magic, you could live without pain, with hope, no matter what happened to you.”

— Charles Bukowski

319. “Looking for God-or Heaven-by exploring space is like reading or seeing all Shakespeare’s plays in the hope that you will find Shakespeare as one of the characters...”

— C. S. Lewis

320. “A truly great book should be read in youth, again in maturity and once more in old age, as a fine building should be seen by morning light, at noon and by moonlight.”

— Robertson Davies

321. “He does not write at all whose poems no man reads.”

— Marcus Aurelius

322. “Take Time Out. It’s not a real vacation if you’re reading email or calling in for messages.”

— Randy Pausch

323. “It is good from time to time to recall all those big and little reasons why you wanted to quit smoking in the first place. Reading this blog once in a while might also be helpful.”

— Zig Ziglar

324. “You can’t develop character by reading books. You develop it from conflict.”

— Leonard Ravenhill

325. “Children of the future age Reading this indignant page Know that in a former time Love, sweet love, was thought a crime.”

— William Blake

326. “Camerado! This is no book; who touches this touches a man.”

— Walt Whitman

327. “I believe we have an obligation to read for pleasure, in private and in public places. If we read for pleasure, if others see us reading, then we learn, we exercise our imaginations. We show others that reading is a good thing.”

— Neil Gaiman

328. “When you sell a man a book, you don’t sell him 12 ounces of paper and ink and glue – you sell him a whole new life.”

— Christopher Morley

329. “Give yourself to prayer, to reading and meditation on divine truths: strive to penetrate to the bottom of them and never be content with a superficial knowledge.”

— David Brainerd

330. “Children who are read to learn two things: First, that reading is worthwhile, and second, that they are worthwhile.”

— Laura Bush

331. “The Bible does not thrill; the Bible nourishes. Give time to the reading of the Bible and the recreating effect is as real as that of fresh air physically.”

— Oswald Chambers

332. “I shall keep my book on the table here, and read a little every morning as soon as I wake, for I know it will do me good, and help me through the day.”

— Louisa May Alcott

333. “Learn as much by writing as by reading.”

— Lord Acton

334. “Literature is a luxury; fiction is a necessity.”

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

335. “That is a good book which is opened with expectation, and closed with delight and profit.”

— Amos Bronson Alcott

336. “This book was written in those long hours I spent waiting for my wife to get dressed to go out. And if she had never gotten dressed at all this book would never have been written.”

— Groucho Marx

337. “When I look back, I am so impressed again with the life-giving power of literature. If I were a young person today, trying to gain a sense of myself in the world, I would do that again by reading, just as I did when I was young.”

— Maya Angelou

338. “Writing is a conversation with reading; a dialogue with thinking. All conversations with older people contain repetition. Some of the ideas mean a lot to me, just interesting, so I both embrace and attack the ideas because I found them, well, delightful.”

— Nikki Giovanni

339. “Reading is equivalent to thinking with someone else’s head instead of with one’s own.”

— Arthur Schopenhauer

340. “Read anything I write for the pleasure of reading it. Whatever else you find will be the measure of what you brought to the reading.”

— Ernest Hemingway

341. “I read that heavy drinking is bad for your health. I decided I better stop reading.”

— Charles Barkley

342. “Some of these things are true and some of them lies. But they are all good stories.”

— Hilary Mantel

343. “You have to be a speedy reader because there’s so so much to read.”

— Dr. Seuss

344. “What are you reading for?”

— Bill Hicks

345. “As we read spiritually about spiritual things, we open our hearts to God’s voice. Sometimes we must be willing to put down the book we are reading and just listen to what God is saying to us through our words.”

— Henri J.M. Nouwen

346. “The book thief has struck for the first time – the beginning of an illustrious career.”

— Markus Zusak

347. “For people who are readers, reading is important to them.”

— Jeff Bezos

348. “I’m very shy really. I spend a lot of time in my room alone reading or writing or watching television.”

— Johnny Cash

349. “Reading is an active, imaginative act; it takes work.”

— Khaled Hosseini

350. “Reading the morning newspaper is the realist’s morning prayer.”

— Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel