Top 500 Reading Quotes (2025 Update)
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401. “I have good reason to be content, for thank God I can read and perhaps understand Shakespeare to his depths.”

— John Keats

402. “When I’m really into a novel, I’m seeing the world differently during that time – not just for the hour or so in the day when I get to read. I’m actually walking around in a haze, spellbound by the book and looking at everything through a different prism.”

— Colin Firth

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

— Clarence Day

404. “The less we know the more we suspect.”

— Josh Billings

405. “Life being very short, and the quiet hours of it few, we ought to waste none of them in reading valueless books.”

— John Ruskin

406. “The regret on our side is, they used to say years ago, we are reading about you in science class. Now they say, we are reading about you in history class.”

— Neil Armstrong

407. “We read five words on the first page of a really good novel and we begin to forget that we are reading printed words on a page; we begin to see images.”

— John Gardner

408. “Reading one’s own poems aloud is letting the cat out of the bag. You may have always suspected bits of a poem to be overweighted, overviolent, or daft, and then, suddenly, with the poet’s tongue around them, your suspicion is made certain.”

— Dylan Thomas

409. “For every book you buy, you should buy the time to read it.”

— Karl Lagerfeld

410. “No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader.”

— Ernest Hemingway

411. “I’ve been reading tabloids since I was nine. I love a good story.”

— Lana Del Rey

412. “It was as though I had been dying of thirst and the librarian had handed me a five gallon bucket of water. I drank and drank. The only reason I am here and not in prison is because of that woman. I was a loser, but she showed me the power of reading.”

— Gary Paulsen

413. “To solve the drug problem, we have to start at the root – first grade. If a boy has all the toys in his head that reading can give him, and you hook him into science fiction, then you’ve got the future secured.”

— Ray Bradbury

414. “The detective story is the normal recreation of noble minds.”

— Philip Guedalla

415. “The tablet is not mainstream. Reading off the screen is not mainstream.”

— Bill Gates

416. “As we regularly spend time reading God’s Word and talking to Him in prayer, we put ourselves in position for Him to do things in our lives we could never do on our own.”

— Joyce Meyer

417. “Writing in English is the most ingenious torture ever devised for sins committed in previous lives. The English reading public explains the reason why.”

— James Joyce

418. “All reading for pleasure is entertainment.”

— Raymond Chandler

419. “There is an art of reading, as well as an art of thinking, and an art of writing.”

— Clarence Day

420. “The Only way to do all the things you’d like to do is to read.”

— Tom Clancy

421. “Don’t ask me who’s influenced me. A lion is made up of the lambs he’s digested, and I’ve been reading all my life.”

— Charles de Gaulle

422. “Reading dreams. That’s what started her walking down the road. Every day she’d walk a little further: a mile, and come home. Two miles, and come home. One day she just kept on.”

— Truman Capote

423. “Reading a novel, War and Peace for example, is no Catnap. Because a novel is so long, reading one is like being married forever to somebody nobody knows or cares about.”

— Kurt Vonnegut

424. “Reading the situation correctly is part of getting through it safely.”

— Ally Condie

425. “If there was no Bible, it would be no matter whether you could read or not. Reading other books would do you no good.”

— Jupiter Hammon

426. “In the library I felt better, words you could trust and look at till you understood them, they couldn’t change half way through a sentence like people, so it was easier to spot a lie.”

— Jeanette Winterson

427. “He told himself that he would have to start reading thicker books: they lasted longer, and made more comfortable pillows.”

— Paulo Coelho

428. “Reading keeps me sane. Growing up, it was my scape, my alternative; it provided both rebellion and peace.”

— Amber Heard

429. “Whether in music or in fiction, the most basic thing is rhythm. Your style needs to have good, natural, steady rhythm, or people won’t keep reading your work.”

— Haruki Murakami

430. “War makes good history but peace is poor reading.”

— Thomas Hardy

431. “By the time you finish reading this sentence, a Boeing jetliner will take off or land somewhere in the world.”

— Bret Easton Ellis

432. “If one wishes to know love, one must live love, in action. Thoughts, readings and discourse on love are of value only as they present questions to be acted upon.”

— Leo Buscaglia

433. “Theres nothing like reading about a world that feels dead to throw your own beautiful, colorful life into sharp relief.”

— Ally Condie

434. “As for reading, I wish I had a magic door to a library where I could go in, read for days and days, and come back in the same minute I left. I’m still looking for the door.”

— David Mitchell

435. “Today, everything I do from morning meditation on – eating breakfast, going for a walk, writing, reading, even recreation – is governed by one purpose only: how to give the very best account of my life that I can in the service of all.”

— Eknath Easwaran

436. “Reading good books ruins you for enjoying bad books.”

— Mary Ann Shaffer

437. “Whatever sentence will bear to be read twice, we may be sure was thought twice.”

— Henry David Thoreau

438. “With one day’s reading a man may have the key in his hands.”

— Ezra Pound

439. “I would like my personal reading map to resemble a map of the British Empire circa 1900.”

— Nick Hornby

440. “Often you must turn your stylus to erase, if you hope to write anything worth a second reading.”

— Horace

441. “I must judge for myself, but how can I judge, how can any man judge, unless his mind has been opened and enlarged by reading.”

— John Adams

442. “Besides, rereading, not reading, is what counts.”

— Jorge Luis Borges

443. “When you’re unhappy, I guess everything in the world – reading, eating, sleeping – has something buried somewhere inside it that just makes you unhappier.”

— Nick Hornby

444. “I shall remain on Mars and read a book.”

— Ray Bradbury

445. “The pleasure of all reading is doubled when one lives with another who shares the same books.”

— Katherine Mansfield

446. “When was the last time you read a book? The truth now. And picture books don’t count-I mean something with print in it.”

— William Goldman

447. “Writing stories is my way of scratching that itch: my escape from the claustrophobia of individuality. It lets me, at least for a while, live more than one life, walk more than one path. Reading, of course, can do the same.”

— Emma Donoghue

448. “I’m always writing – its what I like to do. But when I’m not writing, I’m reading.”

— Michael Scott

449. “Writing can come naturally to some. Still, when it comes to good writing, this is true: Easy reading is damn hard writing.”

— Nathaniel Hawthorne

450. “The secret to speed-reading is moving your lips faster.”

— Charles M. Schulz