180 Reading Quotes that Will Make You Enjoy Reading Even More

Reading is a pleasant activity -- one that you should always find time for. Why? Well, there are many reasons, but the most important are the fact that reading helps you disconnect when you need to, it opens your mind and it makes you wiser.

The more you read, the more you realize how little you actually know about the world you live in, and even about yourself. Reading makes you understand other people’s points of view, or their culture -- it’s a chance to connect with others in a unique and profound way.

While reading you can explore the author’s imagination, or better yet, you can use your own to make everything you read even more interesting.

There are thousands of worlds and lives that can only be explored through reading. You will meet, resonate and connect with amazing characters only by enjoying a good book.

Read for pleasure or to gain more knowledge in whatever field interests you -- it will feed your mind and soul!

Here are 180 reading quotes that you’ll love, regardless if you’re an avid reader or not:

Reading quotes to remind you of its importance

You don’t have to be or become a bookworm, but not reading at all means missing one of life’s greatest pleasures. We know, some people just don’t like reading, but we don’t think one can actually hate it. Once you find the right book for you and you’ll be patient enough to go through all its pages, you’ll see that reading is actually great.

Never trust anyone who has not brought a book with them. 

LEMONY SNICKET

You can never get a cup of tea large enough or a book long enough to suit me. 

C.S. LEWIS (more C. S. Lewis quotes)

We read to know we're not alone. 

WILLIAM NICHOLSON

If one cannot enjoy reading a book over and over again, there is no use in reading it at all. 

OSCAR WILDE

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

GROUCHO MARX

A children's story that can only be enjoyed by children is not a good children's story in the slightest. 

C.S. LEWIS

Do not read, as children do, to amuse yourself, or like the ambitious, for the purpose of instruction. No, read in order to live. 

GUSTAVE FLAUBERT

Some books should be tasted, some devoured, but only a few should be chewed and digested thoroughly. 

SIR FRANCIS BACON

You get a little moody sometimes but I think that's because you like to read.

PAT CONROY

There are worse crimes than burning books. One of them is not reading them. 

JOSEPH BRODSKY

Reading was my escape and my comfort, my consolation, my stimulant of choice: reading for the pure pleasure of it, for the beautiful stillness that surrounds you when you hear an author's words reverberating in your head. 

PAUL AUSTER

I read a book one day and my whole life was changed. 

ORHAN PAMUK

No. I can survive well enough on my own — if given the proper reading material. 

SARAH J. MAAS

People say that life is the thing, but I prefer reading. 

LOGAN PEARSALL SMITH

I am too fond of reading books to care to write them. 

OSCAR WILDE

Reading is the sole means by which we slip, involuntarily, often helplessly, into another's skin, another's voice, another's soul. 

JOYCE CAROL OATES

For some of us, books are as important as almost anything else on earth.

 ANNE LAMOTT

Reading was a joy, a desperately needed escape -- I didn't read to learn, I was reading to read. 

CHRISTIAN BAUMAN

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

That's what I love about reading: one tiny thing will interest you in a book, and that tiny thing will lead you to another book, and another bit there will lead you onto a third book. It's geometrically progressive - all with no end in sight, and for no other reason than sheer enjoyment. 

MARY ANN SHAFFER

Closed in a room, my imagination becomes the universe, and the rest of the world is missing out. 

CRISS JAMI

Why can't people just sit and read books and be nice to each other? 

DAVID BALDACCI

He liked the mere act of reading, the magic of turning scratches on a page into words inside his head. 

JOHN GREEN

Reading is that fruitful miracle of a communication in the midst of solitude.

MARCEL PROUST

Man reading should be man intensely alive. The book should be a ball of light in one's hand. 

EZRA POUND

Read the best books first, or you may not have a chance to read them at all. 

HENRY DAVID THOREAU

My personal hobbies are reading, listening to music, and silence. 

EDITH SITWELL

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

JORGE LUIS BORGES

I know every book of mine by its smell, and I have but to put my nose between the pages to be reminded of all sorts of things. 

GEORGE GISSING

Fools have a habit of believing that everything written by a famous author is admirable. For my part I read only to please myself and like only what suits my taste. 

VOLTAIRE

I can feel infinitely alive curled up on the sofa reading a book. 

BENEDICT CUMBERBATCH

Rainy days should be spent at home with a cup of tea and a good book. 

BILL WATTERSON

The problem with books is that they end. 

CAROLINE KEPNES

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

[I] read books because I love them, not because I think I should read them. 

SIMON VAN BOOY

That I can read and be happy while I am reading, is a great blessing. 

ANTHONY TROLLOPE

A precondition for reading good books is not reading bad ones: for life is short. 

ARTHUR SCHOPENHAUER

I am an omnivorous reader with a strangely retentive memory for trifles. 

ARTHUR CONAN DOYLE

Let's be reasonable and add an eighth day to the week that is devoted exclusively to reading. 

LENA DUNHAM

Reading quotes for kids to make them value books

Reading is for any age, but it is so important that we encourage children to do it. There are tons of great stories out there that will develop the child’s imagination and teach him to distinguish between good and evil. Children’s books are filled with hope, amazing places, exciting adventures, and heroes. A kid’s life is better with books in it, so make sure they know that.

Books are the quietest and most constant of friends; they are the most accessible and wisest of counselors, and the most patient of teachers. 

CHARLES W. ELIOT

Books are the plane, and the train, and the road. They are the destination, and the journey. They are home. 

ANNA QUINDLEN

Once you have read a book you care about, some part of it is always with you. 

LOUIS L'AMOUR

Reading brings us unknown friends. 

HONORE DE BALZAC

We read books to find out who we are. What other people, real or imaginary, do and think and feel... is an essential guide to our understanding of what we ourselves are and may become. 

URSULA K. LEGUIN

Some of these things are true and some of them lies. But they are all good stories. 

HILARY MANTEL

No matter who you are, no matter where you live, and no matter how many people are chasing you, what you don't read is often as important as what you do read. 

LEMONY SNICKET

If you don’t like to read, you haven’t found the right book. 

J.K ROWLING (more J. K. Rowling quotes)

So Matilda’s strong young mind continued to grow, nurtured by the voices of all those authors who had sent their books out into the world like ships on the sea. These books gave Matilda a hopeful and comforting message: You are not alone. 

ROALD DAHL

Read. Read. Read. Just don't read one type of book. Read different books by various authors so that you develop different style. 

R.L. STINE

Keep reading. It's one of the most marvelous adventures that anyone can have. 

LLOYD ALEXANDER

Children are made readers on the laps of their parents. 

EMILIE BUCHWALD

To learn to read is to light a fire; every syllable that is spelled out is a spark. 

VICTOR HUGO

Books shouldn't be daunting, they should be funny, exciting and wonderful; and learning to be a reader gives a terrific advantage. 

ROALD DAHL

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

A truly great book should be read in youth, again in maturity and once more in old age, as a fine building should be seen by morning light, at noon and by moonlight. 

ROBERTSON DAVIES

Reading is to the mind what exercise is to the body. 

JOSEPH ADDISON

It wasn't until I started reading and found books they wouldn't let us read in school that I discovered you could be insane and happy and have a good life without being like everybody else. 

JOHN WATERS

Reading is a basic tool in the living of a good life.

MORTIMER J. ADLER

At one magical instant in your early childhood, the page of a book—that string of confused, alien ciphers—shivered into meaning. Words spoke to you, gave up their secrets; at that moment, whole universes opened. You became, irrevocably, a reader. 

ALBERTO MANGUEL

Oh, magic hour, when a child first knows she can read printed words. 

BETTY SMITH

Dr. Seuss reading quotes

Dr. Seuss is one of the most beloved and quoted authors of all time. His stories and words have inspired and entertained people of all ages. One of his main goals was to motivate young kids to read, so here’s our list of Dr. Seuss reading quotes:

The more that you read, the more things you will know. The more that you learn, the more places you’ll go.

DR. SEUSS

You can find magic wherever you look. Sit back and relax, all you need is a book.

DR. SEUSS

You’re never too old, too wacky, too wild, to pick up a book and read to a child.

DR. SEUSS

Fantasy is a necessary ingredient in living.

DR. SEUSS

Be awesome! Be a book nut!

DR. SEUSS

Fill your house with books, in all the crannies and all the nooks.

DR. SEUSS

Reading can take you places you have never been before.

DR. SEUSS

Virtually every page is a cliffhanger – you’ve got to force them to turn it.

DR. SEUSS

Words and pictures are yin and yang. Married, they produce a progeny more interesting than either parent.

DR. SEUSS

Fiction is my addiction.

DR. SEUSS

It has often been said, there’s so much to be read, you never can cram all those words in your head. So the writer who breeds more words than he needs is making a chore for the reader who reads.

DR. SEUSS

A book is just like life and anything can change.

DR. SEUSS

You really can’t teach reading as a science. Love gets mixed up in it.

DR. SEUSS

Read. Travel. Read. Ask. Read. Learn. Read. Connect. Read.

DR. SEUSS

This book is to be read in bed.

DR. SEUSS

You have to be a speedy reader because there’s so so much to read.

DR. SEUSS

Reading is our thing!

DR. SEUSS

Reading quotes from books and literature

It’s no surprise that every great author has devoured books, but some of them were/are so passionate about reading that they mention it in their masterpieces. The way they talk about their love for books is almost contagious.

Here are the best reading quotes from books and literature that you should know:

What really knocks me out is a book that, when you're all done reading it, you wish the author that wrote it was a terrific friend of yours and you could call him up on the phone whenever you felt like it.

J.D. SALINGER (more J. D. Salinger quotes)

I declare after all there is no enjoyment like reading! How much sooner one tires of anything 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

The books that the world calls immoral are books that show the world its own shame. 

OSCAR WILDE

Books are the ultimate Dumpees: put them down and they’ll wait for you forever; pay attention to them and they always love you back. 

JOHN GREEN

Books are a uniquely portable magic. 

STEPHEN KING

Until I feared I would lose it, I never loved to read. One does not love breathing. 

HARPER LEE (To Kill a Mockingbird quotes)

A great book should leave you with many experiences, and slightly exhausted at the end. You live several lives while reading. 

WILLIAM STYRON

Books are mirrors: you only see in them what you already have inside you. 

CARLOS RUIZ ZAFÓN

I spent my life folded between the pages of books. In the absence of human relationships I formed bonds with paper characters. 

TAHEREH MAFI

Many people, myself among them, feel better at the mere sight of a book. 

JANE SMILEY

Words can be like X-rays if you use them properly -- they’ll go through anything. You read and you’re pierced. 

ALDOUS HUXLEY

A good library will never be too neat, or too dusty, because somebody will always be in it, taking books off the shelves and staying up late reading them. 

LEMONY SNICKET

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

The world was hers for the reading. 

BETTY SMITH

The best books... are those that tell you what you know already. 

GEORGE ORWELL (more George Orwell quotes)

he best moments in reading are when you come across something – a thought, a feeling, a way of looking at things – which you had thought special and particular to you. 

ALAN BENNETT

Literature is the most agreeable way of ignoring life. 

FERNANDO PESSOA

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

When we read a story, we inhabit it. The covers of the book are like a roof and four walls. What is to happen next will take place within the four walls of the story. And this is possible because the story's voice makes everything its own. 

JOHN BERGER

There is nothing more luxurious than eating while you read—unless it be reading while you eat. Amabel did both: they are not the same thing, as you will see if you think the matter over. 

E. NESBIT

That perfect tranquility of life, which is nowhere to be found but in retreat, a faithful friend and a good library. 

APHRA BEHN

I was raised among books, making invisible friends in pages that seemed cast from dust and whose smell I carry on my hands to this day. 

CARLOS RUIZ ZAFÓN

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

He read while he walked. He read while he ate. The other librarians suspected he somehow read while he slept, or perhaps didn't sleep at all. 

LAINI TAYLOR

Read more quotes to make you grab a book

Trust us when we say that one life is not enough to go through all the great books ever written, so make sure you read as many as possible. Don’t force yourself to read other people’s recommendations because they might not suit your taste. Read for yourself, whatever interests you -- that’s when reading becomes enjoyable.

Here’s our list of read more quotes that’ll make you grab a book in no time:

Read, read, read. Read everything -- trash, classics, good and bad, and see how they do it. Just like a carpenter who works as an apprentice and studies the master. Read! You'll absorb it.

WILLIAM FAULKNER

'Classic′ - a book which people praise and don't read. 

MARK TWAIN

Sleep is good, he said, and books are better. 

GEORGE R. R. MARTIN

Let us read, and let us dance; these two amusements will never do any harm to the world. 

VOLTAIRE

We live for books. 

UMBERTO ECO

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

She read books as one would breathe air, to fill up and live. 

ANNIE DILLARD

A half-read book is a half-finished love affair. 

DAVID MITCHELL

It is a good rule after reading a new book, never to allow yourself another new one till you have read an old one in between. 

C.S. LEWIS

The worst thing about new books is that they keep us from reading the old ones. 

JOSEPH JOUBERT

My alma mater was books, a good library... I could spend the rest of my life reading, just satisfying my curiosity. 

MALCOLM X

Take a good book to bed with you—books do not snore. 

THEA DORN

No matter how busy you may think you are, you must find time for reading, or surrender yourself to self-chosen ignorance. 

ATWOOD H. TOWNSEND

The odd thing about people who had many books was how they always wanted more. 

PATRICIA A. MCKILLIP

I guess there are never enough books. 

JOHN STEINBECK

Sit in a room and read--and read and read. And read the right books by the right people. Your mind is brought onto that level, and you have a nice, mild, slow-burning rapture all the time. 

JOSEPH CAMPBELL

Read a thousand books, and your words will flow like a river. 

LISA SEE

My reading list grows exponentially. Every time I read a book, it'll mention three other books I feel I have to read. It's like a particularly relentless series of pop-up ads. 

A.J. JACOBS

Quotes about the wisdom of reading

It is impossible not to become smarter after reading books. Of course, maybe only a selection of them will actually make you wiser, but reading anything is better than not reading at all. In time, you will eventually learn how to pick the best books off a shelf. In the meantime, enjoy our list of quotes about the wisdom of reading.

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

Sometimes, you read a book and it fills you with this weird evangelical zeal, and you become convinced that the shattered world will never be put back together unless and until all living humans read the book. 

JOHN GREEN

Reading is essential for those who seek to rise above the ordinary.

JIM ROHN

Only the very weak-minded refuse to be influenced by literature and poetry. 

CASSANDRA CLARE

Today a reader, tomorrow a leader. 

MARGARET FULLER

All I have learned, I learned from books. 

ABRAHAM LINCOLN

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

JOHN LOCKE

If you would tell me the heart of a man, tell me not what he reads, but what he rereads. 

FRANCOIS MAURIAC

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

I owe everything I am and everything I will ever be to books. 

GARY PAULSEN

You want weapons? We're in a library. Books are the best weapon in the world. This room's the greatest arsenal we could have. Arm yourself!

RUSSELL T. DAVIES

Books don't offer real escape, but they can stop a mind scratching itself raw. 

DAVID MITCHELL

Show me a family of readers, and I will show you the people who move the world. 

NAPOLEON BONAPARTE

I read for pleasure and that is the moment I learn the most. 

MARGARET ATWOOD

Reading is everything. Reading makes me feel like I've accomplished something, learned something, become a better person. Reading makes me smarter. Reading gives me something to talk about later on. 

NORA EPHRON

Reading without reflecting is like eating without digesting. 

EDMUND BURKE

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

Ah, how good it is to be among people who are reading. 

RAINER MARIA RILKE

Read not to contradict and confute; nor to believe and take for granted; nor to find talk and discourse; but to weigh and consider.

FRANCIS BACON

Don't join the book burners. Don't think you're going to conceal faults by concealing evidence that they ever existed. Don't be afraid to go in your library and read every book... 

DWIGHT D. EISENHOWER

If we encounter a man of rare intellect, we should ask him what books he reads.

RALPH WALDO EMERSON

You should never read just for 'enjoyment.' Read to make yourself smarter! Less judgmental. More apt to understand your friends' insane behavior, or better yet, your own. Pick 'hard books.' Ones you have to concentrate on while reading. 

JOHN WATERS

I am a part of everything that I have read. 

THEODORE ROOSEVELT

The ability to read awoke inside of me some long dormant craving to be mentally alive. 

MALCOLM X

Frederick Douglass 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

In principle and reality, libraries are life-enhancing palaces of wonder. 

GAIL HONEYMAN

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

Inspiring quotes about reading

Books inspire us -- they expand our thinking, our imagination and make us live countless lives through our favorite characters. So why wouldn’t you want all this when you can have it even for free? If you can’t afford books, you can always borrow them from friends or public libraries.

To increase your appetite for good books, we’ve handpicked a list of inspiring quotes about reading. Enjoy!

'A reader lives a thousand lives before he dies', said Jojen. 'The man who never reads lives only one.' 

GEORGE R.R. MARTIN (more George R. R. Martin quotes)

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 (more Oscar Wilde quotes)

If you don't have time to read, you don't have the time (or the tools) to write. Simple as that. 

STEPHEN KING

You don't have to burn books to destroy a culture. Just get people to stop reading them. 

RAY BRADBURY

You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read. It was books that taught me that the things that tormented me most were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive, who had ever been alive. 

JAMES BALDWIN

Think before you speak. Read before you think. 

FRAN LEBOWITZ

No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader. No surprise in the writer, no surprise in the reader. 

ROBERT FROST

There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written, or badly written. That is all. 

OSCAR WILDE

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

Reading is escape, and the opposite of escape; it's a way to make contact with reality after a day of making things up, and it's a way of making contact with someone else's imagination after a day that's all too real.

 NORA EPHRON

People can lose their lives in libraries. They ought to be warned. 

SAUL BELLOW

A good book is an event in my life. 

STENDHA

What a blessing it is to love books as I love them;- to be able to converse with the dead, and to live amidst the unreal! 

THOMAS BABINGTON MACAULAY

A peasant that reads is a prince in waiting. 

WALTER MOSLEY

Reading is like thinking, like praying, like talking to a friend, like expressing your ideas, like listening to other people's ideas, like listening to music, like looking at the view, like taking a walk on the beach. 

ROBERTO BOLAÑO

Everything in the world exists in order to end up as a book. 

STÉPHANE MALLARMÉ

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

To acquire the habit of reading is to construct for yourself a refuge from almost all the miseries of life. 

W. SOMERSET MAUGHAM

Literature is news that stays news. 

EZRA POUND

Books loved anyone who opened them, they gave you security and friendship and didn't ask anything in return; they never went away, never, not even when you treated them badly. 

CORNELIA FUNKE

A book is a garden, an orchard, a storehouse, a party, a company by the way, a counselor, a multitude of counselors. 

CHARLES BAUDELAIRE

No entertainment is so cheap as reading, nor any pleasure so lasting. 

MARY WORTLEY MONTAGU

Libraries will get you through times of no money better than money will get you through times of no libraries. 

ANNE HERBERT

In books I have traveled, not only to other worlds, but into my own. 

ANNA QUINDLEN

I was burning through books every day - stories about people and places I'd never heard of. They were perhaps the only thing that kept me from teetering into utter despair. 

SARAH J. MAAS

The reading of all good books is like conversation with the finest men of past centuries. 

RENÉ DESCARTES

Most of what makes a book 'good' is that we are reading it at the right moment for us. 

ALAIN DE BOTTON

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

No two persons ever read the same book. 

EDMUND WILSON

It is well known that reading quickens the growth of a heart like nothing else. 

CATHERYNNE M. VALENTE

A well-read woman is a dangerous creature. 

LISA KLEYPAS

Books can be dangerous. The best ones should be labeled ‘This could change your life’. 

HELEN EXLEY

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

JOHN KEATS