Top 500 Reading Quotes (2025 Update)
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351. “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

352. “What, however, left a deep impression on me was the reading of the Ramayana before my father. During part of his illness my father was in Porbandar. There every evening he used to listen to the Ramayana.”

— Mahatma Gandhi

353. “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

354. “Most of what makes a book ‘good’ is that we are reading it at the right moment for us.”

— Alain de Botton

355. “Promiscuous reading is necessary to the constituting of human nature. The attempt to keep out evil doctrine by licensing is like the exploit of that gallant man who thought to keep out the crows by shutting the park gate.”

— John Milton

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

— Jaachynma N.E. Agu

357. “You only have to read the lines of scribbly black and everything shines.”

— Syd Barrett

358. “I like reading books that provide you with knowledge that you previously didn’t have. And books you have a chance to grow as a human being after reading them.”

— Megan Fox

359. “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

360. “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

361. “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

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

— Elizabeth Hardwick

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

— Germaine Greer

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

— Stephen King

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

— Arthur Schopenhauer

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

— Charles H. Spurgeon

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

— Maurice Sendak

368. “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

369. “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

370. “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

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

— Jorge Luis Borges

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

— Jerome K. Jerome

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

— Veronica Roth

374. “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

375. “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

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

— Colleen Hoover

377. “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

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

— John Milton

379. “Reading begets reading.”

— Nick Hornby

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

— Rumi

381. “Test scores aren’t perfect, but having a test score for math or reading or other things that we can objectively measure is a meaningful component that makes a lot of sense.”

— Bill Gates

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

— Ronald Reagan

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. “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

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

— Stephen Chbosky

386. “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

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

— George Bernard Shaw

388. “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

389. “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

390. “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

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

— Jean-Jacques Rousseau

392. “I go to books and to nature as the bee goes to a flower, for a nectar that I can make into my own honey.”

— John Burroughs

393. “This earth that we live on is full of stories in the same way that, for a fish, the ocean is full of ocean. Some people say when we are born we’re born into stories. I say we’re also born from stories.”

— Ben Okri

394. “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

395. “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

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

— Marc Bolan

397. “For my whole life, my favorite activity was reading. It’s not the most social pastime.”

— Audrey Hepburn

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

— Carlos Fuentes

399. “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

400. “Whether we are reading the Bible for the first time or standing in a field in Israel next to a historian and an archaeologist and a scholar, the Bible meets us where we are. That is what truth does.”

— Rob Bell