Top 500 Reading Quotes (2024 Update)
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401. “The world of books is the most remarkable creation of man.”

— Clarence Day

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

— George Bernard Shaw

403. “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

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

— John Ruskin

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

— Josh Billings

406. “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

407. “I have good reason to be content, for thank God I can read and perhaps understand Shakespeare to his depths.”

— John Keats

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

— Lana Del Rey

409. “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

410. “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

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

— Ernest Hemingway

412. “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

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

— Philip Guedalla

414. “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

415. “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

416. “Life is hard, and a lot of people come home tired from work. If they’re gonna spend half an hour reading, they want some entertainment and a sense of achievement. So that’s what I give them. That’s all I’m trying to do. Is that really so wrong?”

— James Patterson

417. “All reading for pleasure is entertainment.”

— Raymond Chandler

418. “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

419. “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

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

— Ally Condie

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

— Tom Clancy

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

— Clarence Day

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

— Karl Lagerfeld

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. “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

427. “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

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

— Paulo Coelho

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. “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

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

— Ally Condie

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

— Audrey Hepburn

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

— Bret Easton Ellis

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

— Amber Heard

435. “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

436. “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

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

— Thomas Hardy

438. “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

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

— Nick Hornby

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

— Henry David Thoreau

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

— Jorge Luis Borges

442. “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

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

— Bill Gates

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

— Horace

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

— Ezra Pound

446. “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

447. “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

448. “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

449. “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

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

— Michael Scott