134 Reading Quotes For Every Bibliophile Out There

Bookworms, rejoice! This is an article dedicated to you, to books, and the pleasures of reading! And, although you yourself, having read an uncountable number of books throughout your lifetime, have something to say about the goodness that is reading, why not expand your horizons further with these beautiful reading quotes here? You’ll find quotes on reading here by all the famous writers, including but not limited to J. R. R. Tolkien, Oscar Wilde, and Mark Twain. Besides the writers, other famous figures also had their fair share of thoughts about the importance of books, and their words are as good, and at times might even be better, than those of writers.

Whether you are a fully-fledged bookworm with a room or a nook dedicated to reading pleasures in your home, or just recently found a passion for books, these book quotes will either kindle the love’s flame to an uproarious fire or inspire you to spend even more time reading. Either way, we’ve gathered here today to listen to the beautiful, inspiring words together!

So, let’s get ourselves ready to witness once again the undeniable force that is reading by immersing ourselves in these beautiful quotes on books. As per usual, the list starts just a smidgen down below, so grab your reading glasses, and go straight there! These quotes about the magic of reading are all the very best, but one will definitely be your favorite, so give a vote for it. After you are done, share this article with your bibliophile friends! 

#1

“A reader lives a thousand lives before he dies… The man who never reads lives only one.” — George R. R. Martin

#2

“Let’s be reasonable and add an eighth day to the week that is devoted exclusively to reading.” – Lena Dunham

#3

“One glance at a book and you hear the voice of another person, perhaps someone dead for 1,000 years. To read is to voyage through time.” — Carl Sagan

#4

“I cannot remember the books I’ve read any more than the meals I have eaten; even so, they have made me.” — Ralph Waldo Emerson

#5

“Writing is perhaps the greatest of human inventions, binding together citizens of distant epochs. Books break the shackles of time, proof that humans can work magic.” — Carl Sagan

#6

“Outside of a dog, a book is a man’s best friend. Inside of a dog, it’s too dark to read.” — Groucho Marx

#7

“A book is a gift you can open again and again.” – Garrison Keillor

#8

“You know you’ve read a good book when you turn the last page and feel a little as if you have lost a friend.” — Paul Sweeney

#9

“Books are no more threatened by Kindle than stairs by elevators.” — Stephen Fry

#10

“If you only read the books that everyone else is reading, you can only think what everyone else is thinking.” — Haruki Murakami

#11

“The person who deserves most pity is a lonesome one on a rainy day who doesn’t know how to read.” – Benjamin Franklin

#12

“If you don’t like to read, you haven’t found the right book.” — J.K. Rowling

#13

“I couldn’t live a week without a private library – indeed, I’d part with all my furniture and squat and sleep on the floor before I’d let go of the 1500 or so books I possess.” — H.P. Lovecraft

#14

“I can’t imagine a man really enjoying a book and reading it only once.” — C.S. Lewis

#15

“Reading is essential for those who seek to rise above the ordinary.” — Jim Rohn

#16

“Reading makes immigrants of us all. It takes us away from home, but more important, it finds homes for us everywhere.“ — Jean Rhys

#17

“Once you have read a book you care about, some part of it is always with you.” — Louis L’Amour

#18

““You may have tangible wealth untold. Caskets of jewels and coffers of gold. Richer than I you can never be — I had a mother who read to me.” – Strickland Gillilan

#19

“Books are a uniquely portable magic.” — Stephen King

#20

“A good book is an event in my life.” — Stendhal

#21

“Books are not made for furniture, but there is nothing else that so beautifully furnishes a house.” – Henry Ward Beecher

#22

“Fairytales don’t tell children that dragons exist… Fairytales tell children that dragons can be killed.” — Gilbert K. Chesterton

#23

“You can never get a cup of tea large enough or a book long enough to suit me.” — C. S. Lewis

#24

“These books gave Matilda a hopeful and comforting message: You are not alone.” — Roald Dahl

#25

“I’m old-fashioned and think that reading books is the most glorious pastime that humankind has yet devised.” — Wisława Szymborska

#26

“Of course anyone who truly loves books buys more of them than he or she can hope to read in one fleeting lifetime. A good book, resting unopened in its slot on a shelf, full of majestic potentiality, is the most comforting sort of intellectual wallpaper.” — David Quammen

#27

“Reading—the best state yet to keep absolute loneliness at bay.“ — William Styron

#28

“Reading was a joy, a desperately needed escape — I didn’t read to learn, I was reading to read.” – Christian Bauman

#29

“There are many little ways to enlarge your child’s world. Love of books is the best of all.” — Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis

#30

“So please, oh please, we beg, we pray, go throw your TV set away, and in its place you can install a lovely bookshelf on the wall.” – Roald Dahl

#31

“The reading of all good books is like conversation with the finest (people) of the past centuries.” — Descartes

#32

“The more that you read, the more things you will know. The more that you learn, the more places you’ll go.” – Dr. Seuss

#33

“Once you learn to read, you will be forever free.” – Frederick Douglas

#34

“No entertainment is so cheap as reading, nor any pleasure so lasting.” — Mary Wortley Montagu

#35

“Books are good company, in sad times and happy times, for books are people – people who have managed to stay alive by hiding between the covers of a book.” — E.B. White

#36

“Somebody who only reads newspapers and at best books of contemporary authors looks to me like an extremely near-sighted person who scorns eyeglasses. He is completely dependent on the prejudices and fashions of his times, since he never gets to see or hear anything else.” — Albert Einstein

#37

“There are worse crimes than burning books. One of them is not reading them.” — Joseph Brodsky

#38

“‘Classic’ – a book which people praise and don’t read.” – Mark Twain

#39

“People say that life is the thing, but I prefer reading.” – Logan Pearsall Smith

#40

“Oh, magic hour, when a child first knows she can read printed words!” – Betty Smith

#41

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

#42

“Reading one book is like eating one potato chip.” —Diane Duane

#43

“The man who does not read good books has no advantage over the man who can’t read.” — Mark Twain

#44

“Children are made readers on the laps of their parents.” — Emilie Buchwald

#45

“It’s not that I don’t like people. It’s just that when I’m in the company of others – even my nearest and dearest – there always comes a moment when I’d rather be reading a book.” — Maureen Corrigan

#46

“Luckily, I always travel with a book, just in case I have to wait on line for Santa, or some such inconvenience.” — David Levithan

#47

“We read in bed because reading is halfway between life and dreaming, our own consciousness in someone else’s mind.“ — Anna Quindlen

#48

“Make it a rule never to give a child a book you would not read yourself.” — George Bernard Shaw

#49

“A writer only begins a book. A reader finishes it.” — Samuel Johnson

#50

“That’s the thing about books. They let you travel without moving your feet.” – Jhumpa Lahiri

#51

“There is more treasure in books than in all the pirate’s loot on Treasure Island.” — Walt Disney

#52

“There is nothing more luxurious than eating while you read—unless it be reading while you eat.” — E. Nesbit

#53

“I have a passion for teaching kids to become readers, to become comfortable with a book, not daunted. Books shouldn’t be daunting, they should be funny, exciting and wonderful; and learning to be a reader gives a terrific advantage.” — Roald Dahl

#54

“Despite the enormous quantity of books, how few people read! And if one reads profitably, one would realize how much stupid stuff the vulgar herd is content to swallow every day.” — Voltaire

#55

“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

#56

“Reading furnishes the mind only with materials of knowledge; it is thinking that makes what we read ours.” – John Locke

#57

“I read my eyes out and can’t read half enough… The more one reads the more one sees we have to read.” — John Adams

#58

“Always read something that will make you look good if you die in the middle of it.” — P. J. O’Rourke

#59

“You don’t have to burn books to destroy a culture. Just get people to stop reading them.” – Ray Bradbury

#60

“Reading is a discount ticket to everywhere.” — Mary Schmich

#61

“Libraries will get you through times of no money better than money will get you through times of no libraries.” — Anne Herbert

#62

“Reading should not be presented to children as a chore or a duty. It should be offered as a gift.” — Kate DiCamillo

#63

“Where is human nature so weak as in the bookstore?” — Henry Ward Beecher

#64

“If you would tell me the heart of a man, tell me not what he reads, but what he rereads.” — François Mauriac

#65

“Many people, myself among them, feel better at the mere sight of a book.” — Jane Smiley

#66

“People can lose their lives in libraries. They ought to be warned.” — Saul Bellow

#67

“If there is a book that you want to read, but it hasn’t been written yet, you must be the one to write it.” — Toni Morrison

#68

“Never trust anyone who has not brought a book with them.” — Lemony Snicket

#69

“In the case of good books, the point is not to see how many of them you can get through, but rather how many can get through to you.” – Mortimer J. Adler

#70

“The world was hers for the reading.” – Betty Smith

#71

“Literature is the most agreeable way of ignoring life.” – Fernando Pessoa

#72

“We are of opinion that instead of letting books grow moldy behind an iron grating, far from the vulgar gaze, it is better to let them wear out by being read.” — Jules Verne

#73

“A room without books is like a body without a soul.” — Cicero

#74

“I think books are like people, in the sense that they’ll turn up in your life when you most need them.” — Emma Thompson

#75

“To acquire the habit of reading is to construct for yourself a refuge from almost all the miseries of life.” — W. Somerset Maugham

#76

“Employ your time in improving yourself by other men’s writings so that you shall come easily by what others have labored hard for.” — Socrates

#77

“A book is a garden, an orchard, a storehouse, a party, a company by the way, a counselor, a multitude of counselors.” – Charles Baudelaire

#78

“Come to the book as you would come to an unexplored land. Come without a map. Explore it and draw your own map.” – Stephen King

#79

“I have always imagined paradise as a kind of library.” — Jorge Luis Borges.

#80

“My alma mater was books, a good library…. I could spend the rest of my life reading, just satisfying my curiosity.” — Malcolm X

#81

“It is what you read when you don’t have to that determines what you will be when you can’t help it.” — Oscar Wilde

#82

“Books are the ultimate dump-ees: Put them down and they’ll wait for you forever; pay attention to them and they always love you back.” — John Green

#83

“Until I feared I would lose it, I never loved to read. One does not love breathing.” — Harper Lee

#84

“When we are collecting books, we are collecting happiness.” — Vincent Starrett

#85

“A beggar’s book out-worths a noble’s blood.” — William Shakespeare

#86

“Whenever you read a good book, somewhere in the world a door opens to allow in more light.” — Vera Nazarian

#87

“Reading is an exercise in empathy; an exercise in walking in someone else’s shoes for a while.” – Malorie Blackman

#88

“Today a reader, tomorrow a leader.” – Margaret Fuller

#89

“Reading brings us unknown friends” – Honoré de Balzac

#90

“If we encounter a man of rare intellect, we should ask him what books he reads.” — Ralph Waldo Emerson

#91

“Books serve to show a man that those original thoughts of his aren’t very new after all.” — Abraham Lincoln

#92

“I declare after all there is no enjoyment like reading! How much sooner one tires of any thing than of a book! — When I have a house of my own, I shall be miserable if I have not an excellent library.” — Jane Austen

#93

“Never put off till tomorrow the book you can read today.” — Holbrook Jackson

#94

“Reading is an active, imaginative act; it takes work.“ — Khaled Hosseini

#95

“Keep reading. It’s one of the most marvelous adventures that anyone can have.” – Lloyd Alexander

#96

“Think before you speak. Read before you think.” — Fran Lebowitz

#97

“Everything in the world exists in order to end up as a book.” — Stéphane Mallarmé

#98

“I kept always two books in my pocket, one to read, one to write in.” – Robert Louis Stevenson

#99

“Books to the ceiling, Books to the sky, My pile of books is a mile high. How I love them! How I need them! I’ll have a long beard by the time I read them.” — Arnold Lobel

#100

“Beware of the person of one book.” — Thomas Aquinas

#101

“Read the best books first, or you may not have a chance to read them at all.” — Henry David Thoreau

#102

“Show me a family of readers, and I will show you the people who move the world.” – Napoléon Bonaparte

#103

“A classic is a book that has never finished saying what it has to say.” – Italo Calvino

#104

“Ah, how good it is to be among people who are reading.” — Rainer Maria Rilke

#105

“There is no frigate like a book to take us lands away” — Emily Dickinson

#106

“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

#107

“Reading for me, is spending time with a friend.” — Gary Paulsen

#108

“Reading is a basic tool in the living of a good life.” — Mortimer J. Adler

#109

“What better occupation, really, than to spend the evening at the fireside with a book, with the wind beating on the windows and the lamp burning bright.” — Gustave Flaubert

#110

“Reading means borrowing.“ — Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

#111

“A good book has no ending.” — R. D. Cumming

#112

“No one ever reads a book. He reads himself through books.” — Romain Rolland

#113

“I find television very educating. Every time somebody turns on the set, I go into the other room and read a book.” — Groucho Marx

#114

“Literature is news that stays news.” — Ezra Pound

Image source: source

#115

“I read a book one day and my whole life was changed.” – Orhan Pamuk

#116

“To learn to read is to light a fire; every syllable that is spelled out is a spark.” – Victor Hugo

#117

“Rainy days should be spent at home with a cup of tea and a good book.” — Bill Watterson

#118

“I guess there are never enough books.” — John Steinbeck

#119

“I took a speed-reading course and read War and Peace in twenty minutes. It involves Russia.” — Woody Allen

#120

“From the reading of ‘good books’ there comes a richness of life that can be obtained in no other way.” – Gordon B. Hinckley

#121

“Reading is an act of civilization; it’s one of the greatest acts of civilization because it takes the free raw material of the mind and builds castles of possibilities.“ — Ben Okri

#122

“I leapt eagerly into books. The characters’ lives were so much more interesting than the lonely heartbeat of my own.” – Ruta Sepetys

#123

“Reading takes us away from home, but more important, it finds homes for us everywhere.” — Hazel Rochman

#124

“Just the knowledge that a good book is awaiting one at the end of a long day makes that day happier.” — Kathleen Norris

#125

“No. I can survive well enough on my own—if given the proper reading material.” — Sarah J. Maas

#126

“Man reading should be man intensely alive. The book should be a ball of light in one’s hand.” — Ezra Pound

#127

“Finally, from so little sleeping and so much reading, his brain dried up and he went completely out of his mind.” — Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra

#128

“You’re never too old, too wacky, too wild to pick up a book and read to a child.” — Anita Merina

#129

“Reading—even browsing—an old book can yield sustenance denied by a database search.“ — James Gleick

#130

“How many a man has dated a new era in his life from the reading of a book.” — Henry David Thoreau

#131

“It is a great thing to start life with a small number of really good books which are your very own.” — Arthur Conan Doyle

#132

“The unread story is not a story; it is little black marks on wood pulp. The reader, reading it, makes it live: a live thing, a story.“ — Ursula K. Le Guin

#133

“Reading is departure and arrival.“ —Terri Guillemets

#134

“I intend to put up with nothing that I can put down.” — Edgar Allan Poe