Reading Quotes, Sayings

This collection of reading quotes provides a compilation of opinions from literary figures, authors and celebrities about the joys and benefits of reading.

Best reading quotes and sayings

Reading is one of the most treasured pleasures in life. These quotes about reading are sure to inspire anyone who reads. (And more than half of Americans say they read every day!)

Also, parents and teachers can use these quotes to show children the benefits of a life-long love of reading.

1. Short reading quotes

A book is a dream you hold in your hands.
Neil Gaiman

We live and breathe words.
Cassandra Clare

I am a part of everything that I have read.
Theodore Roosevelt

Once you learn to read, you will be forever free.
Frederick Douglass

Think before you speak. Read before you think.
Fran Lebowitz

All I have learned, I learned from books.
Abraham Lincoln

To read is to voyage through time.
Carl Sagan

We read to know we’re not alone.
William Nicholson

We live for books.
Umberto Eco

Reading is a discount ticket to everywhere.
Mary Schmich

Short sayings about reading

Reading brings us unknown friends.
Honore de Balzac

There is no friend as loyal as a book.
Ernest Hemingway

The world belongs to those who read.
Rick Holland

The world was hers for the reading.
Betty Smith, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn

A peasant that reads is a prince in waiting.
Walter Mosley

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

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

A good book is an event in my life.
Stendhal

I guess there are never enough books.
John Steinbeck

Reading sayings for bookmarks and more

Use these sayings to make a homemade bookmark with a clever saying about your love of reading. Or use these reading quotes to caption your Instagram posts.

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

When you lose yourself in a book the hours grow wings and fly.
Chloe Thurlow

My life is a reading list.
John Irving

A well-read woman is a dangerous creature.
Lisa Kleypas

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

I love the smell of book ink in the morning.
Umberto Eco

Reading one book is like eating one potato chip.
Diane Duane

Each book was a world unto itself, and in it I took refuge.
Alberto Manguel

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

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

2. Reading quotes for kids

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

Books may well be the only true magic.
Alice Hoffman

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

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

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

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

3. For classrooms, teachers

Books and doors are the same thing. You open them, and you go through into another world.
Jeanette Winterson

We may sit in our library and yet be in all quarters of the earth.
John Lubbock

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

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

Why reading is important quotes

Today a reader, tomorrow a leader.
Margaret Fuller

If you are going to get anywhere in life you have to read a lot of books.
Roald Dahl

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

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

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

Inspiring students to read

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

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

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

A word after a word after a word is power.
Margaret Atwood

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

Motivational sayings

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

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

It is not true that we have only one life to live; if we can read, we can live as many more lives and as many kinds of lives as we wish.
S.I. Hayakawa

Reading and understanding

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

Reading without reflecting is like eating without digesting.
Edmund Burke

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

4. Funny reading quotes

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

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

′Classic′ — a book which people praise and don’t read.
Mark Twain

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

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

From the moment I picked up your book until I put it down, I was convulsed with laughter. Some day I intend reading it.
Groucho Marx

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

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

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

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

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

5. Quotes about books

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

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

Fill your house with stacks of books, in all the crannies and all the nooks.
Dr. Seuss

I have always imagined that paradise will be a kind of library.
Jorge Luis Borges

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

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

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

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

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

6. Reading quotes for adults

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

A children’s story that can only be enjoyed by children is not a good children’s story in the slightest.
C.S. Lewis

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

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

No book is really worth reading at the age of ten which is not equally — and often far more — worth reading at the age of fifty and beyond.
C.S. Lewis

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

7. Inspirational reading quotes

What I love most about reading: It gives you the ability to reach higher ground. And keep climbing.
Oprah

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

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

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

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

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

Reading and creativity

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

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

Easy reading is damn hard writing.
Nathaniel Hawthorne

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

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

Then write. If it’s good, you’ll find out. If it’s not, throw it out of the window.
William Faulkner

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

8. Reading and imagination quotes

Books are a uniquely portable magic.
Stephen King

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

Reading and escape

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

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

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

9. Love of reading sayings

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

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

There are many little ways to enlarge your world. Love of books is the best of all.
Jacqueline Kennedy

A short story is a different thing altogether — a short story is like a quick kiss in the dark from a stranger.
Stephen King

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

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

The joy of reading

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

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

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

No man can be called friendless who has God and the companionship of good books.
Elizabeth Barrett Browning

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, The Fault in Our Stars

Necessity of reading

We tell ourselves stories in order to live.
Joan Didion

Sleep is good, he said, and books are better.
George R. R. Martin

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

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

He that loves reading has everything within his reach.
William Godwin

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

10. Famous reading quotes

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

Literature is my Utopia.
Helen Keller

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

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

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

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

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

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

11. Reading quotes by famous authors

The best books are those that tell you what you know already.
George Orwell, 1984

If a book is well written, I always find it too short.
Jane Austen

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

Some books leave us free and some books make us free.
Ralph Waldo Emerson

There is no Frigate like a Book To take us Lands away.
Emily Dickinson

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. That doesn’t happen much, though.
J.D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye