Top 500 Reading Quotes (2024 Update)
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351. “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

352. “Maybe this is why we read, and why in moments of darkness we return to books: to find words for what we already know.”

— Alberto Manguel

353. “The open secret of many Bible believing Churches is that a vanishingly small percentage of those talking about prayer and Bible reading are actually doing what they are talking about.”

— Dallas Willard

354. “I am blessed to receive a word from God every day in receiving the scriptures and reading the scriptures. And God speaks through the Bible.”

— Ted Cruz

355. “A library is a place where you can lose your innocence without losing your virginity.”

— Germaine Greer

356. “One gains at least two to three times more experience grabbing the tiger by the tail than reading about it in a book.”

— Mark Twain

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

— Arthur Schopenhauer

358. “The greatest gift is a passion for reading.”

— Elizabeth Hardwick

359. “Feelings, too, are facts. Emotion is a fact. Human experience is a fact. It is often possible to gain more real insight into human beings and their motivation by reading great fiction than by personal acquaintance.”

— Eleanor Roosevelt

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

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

361. “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

362. “Reading takes time, and the glass teat takes too much of it.”

— Stephen King

363. “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

364. “Reading a book is like re-writing it for yourself. You bring to a novel, anything you read, all your experience of the world. You bring your history and you read it in your own terms.”

— Angela Carter

365. “Do not seek so anxiously to be developed, to subject yourself to many influences to be played on; it is all dissipation. Humility like darkness reveals the heavenly lights.”

— Henry David Thoreau

366. “Don’t set your goals by what other people deem important.”

— Jaachynma N.E. Agu

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

— Hilary Mantel

368. “Reading is such a huge part of my life.”

— Veronica Roth

369. “There’s so much more to a book than just the reading.”

— Maurice Sendak

370. “I’ve never known any trouble than an hour’s reading didn’t assuage.”

— Arthur Schopenhauer

371. “Little learning and much pride come of hasty reading.”

— Charles H. Spurgeon

372. “I had walked into that reading-room a happy, healthy man. I crawled out a decrepit wreck.”

— Jerome K. Jerome

373. “A good book is the precious lifeblood of a master spirit.”

— John Milton

374. “Frederick Douglas taught that literacy is the path from slavery to freedom. There are many kinds of slavery and many kinds of freedom, but reading is still the path.”

— Carl Sagan

375. “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

376. “I’m pretty sure my addiction to reading has just reached a whole new level.”

— Colleen Hoover

377. “Let others pride themselves about how many pages they have written; I’d rather boast about the ones I’ve read.”

— Jorge Luis Borges

378. “Reading begets reading.”

— Nick Hornby

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

— Khaled Hosseini

380. “A wise reader reads the book of genius not with his heart, not so much with his brain, but with his spine. It is there that occurs the telltale tingle...”

— Vladimir Nabokov

381. “Studying goes deeper than mere reading. There are surface nuggets to be gathered but the best of the gold is underneath, and it takes time and labor to secure it.”

— Mary McLeod Bethune

382. “You have to have really wide reading habits and pay attention to the news and just everything that’s going on in the world: you need to. If you get this right, then the writing is a piece of cake.”

— Terry Pratchett

383. “Easy reading is damn hard writing. But if it’s right, it’s easy. It’s the other way round, too. If it’s slovenly written, then it’s hard to read. It doesn’t give the reader what the careful writer can give the reader.”

— Maya Angelou

384. “On Friday night, I was reading my new book, but my brain got tired, so I decided to watch some television instead.”

— Stephen Chbosky

385. “I always read. You know how sharks have to keep swimming or they die? I’m like that. If I stop reading, I die.”

— Patrick Rothfuss

386. “Reading the Bible will help you get to know the word, but it’s when you put it down and live your life that you get to know the author.”

— Steve Maraboli

387. “Asleep or awake, writing or reading, whatever you do, you must never be without the remembrance of God.”

— Rumi

388. “Pray and learn to pray! Deepen your knowledge of the Word of the Living God by reading and meditating on the Scriptures.”

— Pope John Paul II

389. “The clever reader who is capable or reading between these lines what does not stand written in them but is nevertheless implied will be able to form some conception.”

— Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

390. “Every time people force themselves to carry on with a book they’re not enjoying, they reinforce the idea that reading is a duty.”

— Nick Hornby

391. “Leave all the afternoon for exercise and recreation, which are as necessary as reading. I will rather say more necessary because health is worth more than learning.”

— Thomas Jefferson

392. “My doctors told me this morning my blood pressure is down so low that I can start reading the newspapers.”

— Ronald Reagan

393. “Now, I saw, upon a time, when he was walking in the fields, that he was, as he was wont, reading in his book, and greatly distressed in his mind; and, as he read, he burst out, as he had done before, crying, What shall I do to be saved?”

— John Bunyan

394. “Book after book, I get hooked, every time the writer talks to me like a friend.”

— Marc Bolan

395. “It is absurd and anti-life to be a part of a system that compels you to listen to a stranger reading poetry when you want to learn to construct buildings, or to sit with a stranger discussing the construction of buildings when you want to read poetry.”

— John Taylor Gatto

396. “The world is the book of women. Whatever knowledge they may possess is more commonly acquired by observation than by reading.”

— Jean-Jacques Rousseau

397. “The first time I read an excellent book, it is to me just as if I had gained a new friend. When I read a book over I have perused before, it resembles the meeting with an old one.”

— Oliver Goldsmith

398. “Reading, writing, teaching, learning, are all activities aimed at introducing civilizations to each other.”

— Carlos Fuentes

399. “The world of books is the most remarkable creation of man.”

— Clarence Day

400. “Reading made Don Quixote a gentleman, but believing what he read made him mad.”

— George Bernard Shaw