Who doesn’t love getting lost in a book? Reading not only opens up doors and inspires, it also serves as a timeless education for many. Using quotes about reading around your classroom can encourage students to start a new book series or learn something new. Check out this list of our favorite quotes about reading!
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Quotes About Reading by Authors
“Reading is an exercise in empathy; an exercise in walking in someone else’s shoes for a while.” —Malorie Blackman
“It was a wonderful night, such a night as is only possible when we are young, dear reader.” —Fyodor Dostoyevsky
“Think before you speak. Read before you think.” —Fran Lebowitz
“Once you have read a book you care about, some part of it is always with you.” —Louis L’Amour
“Rainy days should be spent at home with a cup of tea and a good book.” —Bill Watterson
“Books break the shackles of time, proof that humans can work magic.” —Carl Sagan
“I have always imagined that paradise will be a kind of library.” —Jorge Luis Borges
“Keep reading. It’s one of the most marvelous adventures that anyone can have.” —Lloyd Alexander
“Books are the mirrors of the soul.” —Virginia Woolf
“The world is shaped by two things—stories told and the memories they leave behind.” —Vera Nazarian
“Writing is not like painting where you add. … Writing is more like a sculpture where you remove, you eliminate in order to make the work visible. Even those pages you remove somehow remain.” —Elie Wiesel
“Books should go where they will be most appreciated, and not sit unread, gathering dust on a forgotten shelf, don’t you agree?” —Christopher Paolini
“Immersing oneself in the problems of a book is a good way to keep from thinking of love.” —Orhan Pamuk
“A mind needs books as a sword needs a whetstone, if it is to keep its edge.” —George R.R. Martin
“Stories can conquer fear, you know. They can make the heart bigger.” —Ben Okri
“Reading—the best state yet to keep absolute loneliness at bay.” —William Styron
“I divide all readers into two classes: those who read to remember and those who read to forget.”—William Lyon Phelps
“I can’t write without a reader. It’s precisely like a kiss—you can’t do it alone.” —John Cheever
“Books themselves need no defense. Their spokesmen come and go, their readers live and die, they remain constant.” —Lawrence Clark Powell
“The profession of the writer has its thorns about which the reader does not dream.” —Henryk Sienkiewicz
“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. LeGuin
“As writers and readers, as sinners and citizens, our realism and our aesthetic sense make us wary of crediting the positive note.” —Seamus Heaney
“A reader lives a thousand lives before he dies, said Jojen. The man who never reads lives only one.” —George R.R. Martin
“There isn’t any distinction between a reader and a writer—reading is so much a part of it.” —Dermot Healy
“If modesty and candor are necessary to an author in his judgment of his own works, no less are they in his reader.” —Sarah Fielding
“A novel is like a bow, and the violin that produces the sound is the reader’s soul.” —Stendhal
“Readers have a loyalty that cannot be matched anywhere else in the creative arts, which explains why so many writers who have run out of gas can keep coasting anyway, propelled on to the bestseller lists …” —Stephen King
Books are patient where we are slow to understand, allow us to go over the hard parts as many times as we wish, and are never critical of our lapses. —Carl Sagan
It is so unsatisfactory to read a noble passage and have no one you love at hand to share the happiness with you. —Mark Twain
Kids, the fiction is the truth inside the lie, and the truth of this fiction is simple enough: the magic exists. —Stephen King
Books are key to understanding the world and participating in a democratic society. —Carl Sagan
Read good books, have good sentences in your ears. —Jane Kenyon
Before a book can change you, you have to love it. —Jonathan Franzen
Books permit us to voyage through time, to tap the wisdom of our ancestors. —Carl Sagan
A great book should leave you with many experiences, and slightly exhausted at the end. You live several lives while reading it. —William Styron
One more book, he had told himself, then I’ll stop. One more folio, just one more. One more page, then I’ll go up and rest and get a bite to eat. But there was always another page after that one, and another after that, and another book waiting underneath the pile. —George R.R. Martin
Books are my friends, my companions. They make me laugh and cry and find meaning in life. —Christopher Paolini
The library connects us with the insights and knowledge, painfully extracted from Nature, of the greatest minds that ever were, with the best teachers, drawn from the entire planet and from all of our history, to instruct us without tiring, and to inspire us to make our own contribution to the collective knowledge of the human species. —Carl Sagan
Literature is the art of writing something that will be read twice; journalism what will be grasped at once, and they require separate techniques. —Cyril Connolly
When I only begin to read, I forget I’m on this world. It lifts me on wings with high thoughts. —Anzia Yezierska
The time to read is any time: no apparatus, no appointment of time and place, is necessary. It is the only art which can be practiced at any hour of the day or night, whenever the time and inclination comes, that is your time for reading; in joy or sorrow, health or illness. —Holbrook Jackson
Bea says that the art of reading is slowly dying, that it’s an intimate ritual, that a book is a mirror that offers us only what we already carry inside us, that when we read, we do it with all our heart and mind, and great readers are becoming more scarce by the day. —Carlos Ruiz Zafón
I think you should only read those books which bite and sting you. —Franz Kafka
Few things leave a deeper mark on a reader than the first book that finds its way into his heart. —Carlos Ruiz Zafón
The greatest part of a writer’s time is spent in reading, in order to write: a man will turn over half a library to make one book. —Samuel Johnson
There are worse crimes than burning books. One of them is not reading them. —Joseph Brodsky
No entertainment is so cheap as reading, nor any pleasure so lasting. —Lady Mary Mortley Montagu
If I read a book and it makes my whole body so cold no fire can ever warm me, I know that is poetry. —Emily Dickinson
The pleasure of all reading is doubled when one lives with another who shares the same books. —Katherine Mansfield
People say that life is the thing, but I prefer reading. —Logan Pearsall Smith
My personal hobbies are reading, listening to music, and silence. —Edith Sitwell
Books help to form us. If you cut me open, you will find volume after volume, page after page, the contents of every one I have ever read … I am the unique sum of the books I have read. I am my literary DNA. —Susan Hill
There is no Frigate like a Book To take us Lands away Nor any Coursers like a Page Of prancing Poetry —Emily Dickinson
To know a man’s library is, in some measure, to know a man’s mind. —Geraldine Brooks
Until I feared I would lose it, I never loved to read. One does not love breathing. —Harper Lee
A book is a version of the world. If you do not like it, ignore it; or offer your own version in return. —Salman Rushdie
Quotes About Reading by Children’s Book Authors
“Some of my youthful readers are developing wonderful imaginations. This pleases me.” —L. Frank Baum
“The true reader reads every work seriously in the sense that he reads it wholeheartedly, makes himself as receptive as he can. But for that very reason he cannot possibly read every work solemnly or gravely. … He will never commit the error of trying to munch whipped cream as if it were venison.” —C.S. Lewis
“And so he was reading the story as if it were a spell and the words of it, spoken aloud, could make magic happen.” —Kate DiCamillo
“The more that you read, the more things you will know. The more that you learn, the more places you’ll go.” —Dr. Seuss
When we read together, we connect. Together, we see the world. Together, we see one another. —Kate DiCamillo
Children read to learn—even when they are reading fantasy, nonsense, light verse, comics, or the copy on cereal packets, they are expanding their minds all the time, enlarging their vocabulary, making discoveries; it is all new to them. —Joan Aiken
He was reading from the beginning so that he could get to the end, where the reader was assured that the knight and the fair maiden lived together happily ever after. —Kate DiCamillo
If books could have more, give more, be more, show more, they would still need readers who bring to them sound and smell and light and all the rest that can’t be in books. The book needs you. —Gary Paulsen
You gave me Christopher Robin, and then You breathed new life in Pooh. Whatever of each has left my pen Goes homing back to you. My book is ready, and comes to greet The mother it longs to see — It would be my present to you, my sweet, If it weren’t your gift to me. —A.A. Milne
The simplest way to make sure that we raise literate children is to teach them to read, and to show them that reading is a pleasurable activity. —Neil Gaiman
Some day you will be old enough to start reading fairy tales again. —C.S. Lewis
If you are going to get anywhere in life, you have to read a lot of books. —Roald Dahl
Quotes About Reading by Philosophers and Politicians
“Read the best books first, or you may not have a chance to read them at all.” —Henry David Thoreau
“Homeliness is almost as great a merit in a book as in a house, if the reader would abide there. It is next to beauty, and a very high art.” —Henry David Thoreau
“The profit of books is according to the sensibility of the reader. The profoundest thought or passion sleeps as in a mine until an equal mind and heart finds and publishes it.” —Ralph Waldo Emerson
“Good writers have two things in common: they prefer to be understood rather than admired; and they do not write for knowing and over-acute readers.” —Friedrich Nietzsche
“Authors frequently say things they are unaware of; only after they have gotten the reactions of their readers do they discover what they have said.” —Umberto Eco
“Each reader discovers for himself that, with respect to the simpler features of nature, succeeding poets have done little else than copy his similes.” —Henry David Thoreau
“A memorandum is written not to inform the reader but to protect the writer.” —Dean Acheson
“While the spoken word can travel faster, you can’t take it home in your hand. Only the written word can be absorbed wholly at the convenience of the reader.” —Kingman Brewster Jr.
“A capacity, and taste, for reading, gives access to whatever has already been discovered by others. It is the key, or one of the keys, to the already solved problems.” —Abraham Lincoln
“The reading of all good books is like a conversation with the finest minds of past centuries.” —Rene Descartes
“Reading is to the mind what exercise is to the body.” —Richard Steele
“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
“Books serve to show a man that those original thoughts of his aren’t very new at all.” —Abraham Lincoln
Books must be read as deliberately and reservedly as they were written. —Henry David Thoreau
Good books are to the young mind what the warming sun and the refreshing rain of spring are to the seeds which have lain dormant in the frosts of winter. —Horace Mann
Reading furnishes the mind only with materials of knowledge; it is thinking that makes what we read ours. We are of the ruminating kind, and it is not enough to cram ourselves with a great load of collections; unless we chew them over again, they will not give us strength and nourishment. —John Locke
I not only use all the brains I have, but all I can borrow, and I have borrowed a lot since I read it to you first. —Woodrow Wilson
If I had my life to live over again, I would have made a rule to read some poetry and listen to some music at least once every week. —Charles Darwin
Early in the morning, at break of day, in all the freshness and dawn of one’s strength, to read a book—I call that vicious! —Friedrich Nietzsche
Reading maketh a full man, conference a ready man, and writing an exact man. —Francis Bacon
Reading makes a full man, meditation a profound man, discourse a clear man. —Benjamin Franklin
Quotes About Reading by Celebrities
“What I love most about reading: It gives you the ability to reach higher ground. And keep climbing.” —Oprah Winfrey
“I think books are like people, in the sense that they’ll turn up in your life when you most need them.” —Emma Thompson
“There is more treasure in books than in all the pirates’ loot on Treasure Island.” —Walt Disney
Outside of a dog, a book is a man’s best friend. Inside of a dog, it’s too dark to read. —Groucho Marx
More Quotes About Reading
“Reading is essential for those who seek to rise above the ordinary.” —Jim Rohn
“Even in writing an annual report, the unconscious plays a role.” —Mason Cooley
“Today a reader, tomorrow a leader.” —W. Fusselman
“Perhaps there are none more lazy, or more truly ignorant, than your everlasting readers.” —William Cobbett
“One must be a wise reader to quote wisely and well.” —Amos Bronson Alcott
“The newspaper fits the reader’s program while the listener must fit the broadcaster’s program.” —Kingman Brewster Jr.
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