"The more that you read, the more things you will know. The more that you learn, the more places you’ll go."
- Dr. Seuss
Learning
"A reader lives a thousand lives before he dies . . . The man who never reads lives only one."
- George R.R. Martin
Imagination
"My alma mater was books, a good library…. I could spend the rest of my life reading, just satisfying my curiosity."
- Malcolm X
Education
"Reading is the gateway skill that makes all other learning possible."
- Barack Obama
Education
"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
Personal Growth
"Let us remember: one book, one pen, one child, and one teacher can change the world."
- Malala Yousafzai
Empowerment
"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
Inspiration
"To acquire the habit of reading is to construct for yourself a refuge from almost all the miseries of life."
- W. Somerset Maugham
Healing
"Make it a rule never to give a child a book you would not read yourself."
- George Bernard Shaw
Education
"The man who does not read good books is no better than the man who can't."
- Mark Twain
Education
"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
Education
"Fairy tales are more than true: not because they tell us that dragons exist, but because they tell us that dragons can be beaten."
- Neil Gaiman
Courage
"Stories are the most important thing in the world. Without stories, we wouldn't be human beings at all."
- Philip Pullman
Inspiration
"A reader lives a thousand lives before he dies... The man who never reads lives only one."
- George R.R. Martin
Inspiration
"Reading is essential for those who seek to rise above the ordinary."
- Jim Rohn
Ambition
"I have lived a thousand lives and I’ve loved a thousand loves. I’ve walked on distant worlds and seen the end of time. Because I read."
- George RR Martin
Inspiration
"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
Empathy
"A reader lives a thousand lives before he dies . . . The man who never reads lives only one..."
- George RR Martin
Inspiration
"Reading should not be presented to children as a chore or a duty. It should be offered as a gift."
- Kate DiCamillo
Education
"Children are made readers on the laps of their parents."
- Emilie Buchwald
Family
"I lived in books more than I lived anywhere else."
- Neil Gaiman
Inspiration
"There are many little ways to enlarge your child’s world. Love of books is the best of all."
- Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis
Aspirations
"it wasn't for books that I loved as a kid. I think that when you can escape into a book it trains your imagination to think big and to think that more can exist than what you see."
- Taylor Swift
Imagination
"The books transported her into new worlds and introduced her to amazing people who lived exciting lives."
- Roald Dahl
Inspiration
"The world was hers for the reading."
- Betty Smith
Imagination
"I kept always two books in my pocket, one to read, one to write in."
- Robert Louis Stevenson
Creativity
"Until I feared I would lose it, I never loved to read. One does not love breathing."
- Harper Lee
Love
"Oh, magic hour, when a child first knows she can read printed words!"
- A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, 1943
Education
"I read a book one day and my whole life was changed."
- Orhan Pamuk
Transformation
"There is no Frigate like a Book To take us Lands away."
- Emily Dickinson
Imagination
"That is part of the beauty of all literature. You discover that your longings are universal longings, that you’re not lonely and isolated from anyone. You belong."
- F. Scott Fitzgerald
Connection to Earth
"Writing and reading decrease our sense of isolation. They deepen and widen and expand our sense of life: They feed the soul."
- Anne Lamott
Connection to Earth
"We read to know we are not alone."
- C.S. Lewis
Connection to Earth
"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
Knowledge
"Show me a family of readers, and I will show you the people who move the world."
- Napoleon Bonaparte
Connection to Earth
"You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read."
- James Baldwin
Healing
"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
Personal Growth
"Reading makes immigrants of us all. It takes us away from home, but more important, it finds homes for us everywhere."
- Jean Rhys
Connection to Earth
"Books are the plane, and the train, and the road. They are the destination, and the journey. They are home."
- Anna Quindlen
Inspiration
"Books are a uniquely portable magic."
- Stephen King
Inspiration
"A great book should leave you with many experiences, and slightly exhausted at the end. You live several lives while reading."
- William Styron
Personal Growth
"The reading of all good books is like a conversation with the finest minds of past centuries."
- Rene Descartes
Education
"Reading fiction is important. It is a vital means of imagining a life other than our own, which in turn makes us more empathetic beings."
- Ann Patchett
Empathy
"Today a reader, tomorrow a leader."
- Margaret Fuller
Education
"Once you learn to read, you will be forever free."
- Frederick Douglass
Empowerment
"I guess a big part of serious fiction’s purpose is to give the reader... imaginative access to other selves."
- David Foster Wallace
Empathy
"If you don’t like to read, you haven’t found the right book."
- J.K. Rowling
Education
"Some books leave us free and some books make us free."
- Ralph Waldo Emerson
Empowerment
"Books and doors are the same thing. You open them, and you go through into another world."
- Jeanette Winterson
Imagination
"As you read a book word by word and page by page, you participate in its creation."
- Ursula K. Le Guin
Creativity
"Literature is the safe and traditional vehicle through which we learn about the world and pass on values from one generation to the next. Books save lives."
- Laurie Anderson
Education
"Reading is an exercise in empathy; an exercise in walking in someone else’s shoes for a while."
- Malorie Blackman
Empathy
"Salvation is certainly among the reasons I read. Reading and writing have always pulled me out of the darkest experiences in my life."
- Roxane Gay
Healing
"Reading is important. If you know how to read, then the whole world opens up to you."
- Barack Obama
Education
"Books may well be the only true magic."
- Alice Hoffman
Inspiration
"Read, because that’s the way you learn how the language works. That’s the way you learn about emotion, on paper. That’s how you find out how stories are fastened, by reading and reading and reading."
- Yolen
Education
"Some books are so familiar that reading them is like being home again."
- Louisa May Alcott
Happiness
"A book, too, can be a star, a living fire to lighten the darkness, leading out into the expanding universe."
- Madeleine L'Engle
Inspiration
"Reading was my escape and my comfort, my consolation, my stimulant of choice: reading for the pure pleasure of it."
- Paul Auster
Happiness
"The 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
Connection to Earth
"The story is truly finished–and meaning is made–not when the author adds the last period, but when the reader enters."
- Celeste Ng
Inspiration
"A book is a gift you can open again and again."
- Garrison Kellor
Inspiration
"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
Inspiration
"The magic is only in what books say, how they stitched the patches of the universe together into one garment for us."
- Ray Bradbury
Inspiration
"A child who carries a book with a bookmark in it is in two places at the same time."
- Tony Abbott
Imagination
"You can never get a cup of tea large enough or a book long enough to suit me."
- C.S. Lewis
Contentment
"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
Creativity
"The person who deserves most pity is a lonesome one on a rainy day who doesn’t know how to read."
- Benjamin Franklin
Empathy
"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
Wisdom
"Books serve to show a man that those original thoughts of his aren’t very new after all."
- Abraham Lincoln
Wisdom
"The man who does not read good books is no better than the man who can’t."
- Mark Twain
Wisdom
"People say that life is the thing, but I prefer reading."
- Logan Pearsall Smith
Contentment
"A good book is an event in my life."
- Stendhal
Contentment
"Reading brings us unknown friends."
- Honoré de Balzac
Connection to Earth
"Once you have read a book you care about, some part of it is always with you."
- Louis L’Amour
Personal Growth
"Rainy days should be spent at home with a cup of tea and a good book."
- Bill Watterson
Contentment
"Libraries will get you through times of no money better than money will get you through times of no libraries."
- Anne Herbert
Wisdom
"Ah, how good it is to be among people who are reading."
- Rainer Maria Rilke
Connection to Earth
"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
Connection to Earth
"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
Relationships
"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
Family
"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
Inspiration
"I cannot live without books."
- Thomas Jefferson
Belief
"The things I want to know are in books. My best friend is the man who’ll get me a book I [haven’t] read."
- Abraham Lincoln
Knowledge
"Books have a unique way of stopping time in a particular moment and saying: Let’s not forget this."
- Dave Eggers
Inspiration
"Let children read whatever they want and then talk about it with them. If parents and kids can talk together, we won't have as much censorship because we won't have as much fear."
- Judy Blume
Family
"I have always imagined that paradise will be a kind of library."
- Jorge Luis Borges
Imagination
"What an astonishing thing a book is. It’s a flat object made from a tree with flexible parts on which are imprinted lots of funny dark squiggles. But one glance at it and you’re inside the mind of another person ..."
- Carl Sagan
Inspiration
"I feel the need of reading. It is a loss to a man not to have grown up among books."
- Abraham Lincoln
Education
"When I say to a parent, “read to a child,” I don't want it to sound like medicine. I want it to sound like chocolate."
- Mem Fox
Education
"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. Then write. If it is good, you’ll find out. If it's not, throw it out the window."
- William Faulkner
Creativity
"Books make great gifts because they have whole worlds inside of them."
- Kate DiCamillo
Aspirations
"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
Education
"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
Reflection
"There is no substitute for books in the life of a child."
- May Ellen Chase
Education
"A poem begins in delight and ends in wisdom."
- Robert Frost
Inspiration
"The great thing about reading is that it broadens your life."
- George RR Martin
Inspiration
"Sleep is good, and books are better."
- George RR Martin
Inspiration
"Literature offers the thrill of minds of great clarity wrestling with the endless problems and delights of being human. To engage with them is to engage with oneself, and the lasting rewards are not confined to specific career paths."
- Jonathan Stroud
Inspiration
"A book, too, can be a star, 'explosive material, capable of stirring up fresh life endlessly,' a living fire to lighten the darkness, leading out into the expanding universe."
- Madeleine L'Engle
Inspiration
"Stories of imagination tend to upset those without one."
- Terry Pratchett
Creativity
"There is no frigate like a book, to take us lands away."
- Emily Dickinson
Imagination
"I find television very educating. Every time somebody turns on the set, I go into the other room and read a book."
- Groucho Marx
Creativity
"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."
- Mary Ann Shaffer
Inspiration
"Books can be dangerous. The best ones should be labelled 'This could change your life.'"
- Helen Exley
Inspiration
"Writing is thinking on paper."
- William Zinsser
Creativity
"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
Motivation
"Once you've read a book you care about, some part of it is always with you."
- Louis L'Amour
Personal Growth
"There is more treasure in books than in all the pirate’s loot on Treasure Island."
- Walt Disney
Aspirations
"There are no faster or firmer friendships than those formed between people who love the same books."
- Irving Stone
Connection to Earth
"Books have a unique way of stopping time in a particular moment and saying: Let's not forget this."
- Dave Eggers
Inspiration
"One must always be careful of books, and what is inside them, for words have the power to change us."
- Cassandra Clare
Awareness
"Reading should not be presented to children as a chore, a duty. It should be offered as a gift."
- Kate DiCamillo
Education
"It is known that reading quickens the growth of a heart like nothing else."
- Catherynne M. Valente
Growth
"It is really hard to be lonely very long in a world of words."
- Naomi Shihab Nye
Connection to Earth
"We tell ourselves stories in order to live."
- Joan Didion
Inspiration
"A word after a word after a word is power."
- Margaret Atwood
Creativity
"Both reading and writing are experiences – lifelong – in the course of which we who encounter words used in certain ways are persuaded by them to be brought mind and heart within the presence, the power, of the imagination."
- Eudora Welty
Creativity
"A room without books is like a body without a soul."
- Cicero
Inspiration
"We don’t need a list of rights and wrongs, tables of dos and don’ts: We need books, time, and silence."
- Philip Pullman
Inspiration
"That’s the thing about books. They let you travel without moving your feet."
- Jhumpa Lahiri
Imagination
"A story can always break into pieces while it sits inside a book on a shelf; and, decades after we have read it even twenty times, it can open us up, by cut or caress, to a new truth."
- Andre Dubus
Inspiration
"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
Inspiration
"Reading is a form of prayer, a guided meditation that briefly makes us believe we’re someone else."
- George Saunders
Meditation
"Books are mirrors: You only see in them what you already have inside you."
- Carlos Ruiz Zafón
Self-awareness
"I can feel infinitely alive curled up on the sofa reading a book."
- Benedict Cumberbatch
Happiness
"Reading is escape, and the opposite of escape; it's a way to make contact with reality after a day of making things up."
- Nora Ephron
Inspiration
"Read a lot. Expect something big, something exalting or deepening from a book."
- Susan Sontag
Education
"I love the way that each book — any book — is its own journey. You open it, and off you go…"
- Sharon Creech
Inspiration
"I think books are like people, in the sense that they’ll turn up in your life when you most need them."
- Emma Thompson
Connection to Earth
"A book lying idle on a shelf is wasted ammunition. Like money, books must be kept in constant circulation."
- Henry Miller
Responsibility
"A book is a garden, an orchard, a storehouse, a party, a company by the way, a counselor, a multitude of counselors."
- Charles Baudelaire
Inspiration
"A good book should take you out of yourself and then stuff you back in, outsized, now, and uneasy with the fit."
- David Sedaris
Personal Growth
"If you would tell me the heart of a man, tell me not what he reads, but what he rereads."
- François Mauriac
Self-awareness
"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
Inspiration
"Never did she find anything so difficult as to keep herself from losing her temper when she was suddenly disturbed while absorbed in a book. People who are fond of books know the feeling of irritation which sweeps over them at such a moment. The temptation to be unreasonable and snappish is one not easy to manage."
- Frances Hodgson Burnett
Inspiration
"The first draft is a skeleton .… just bare bones. The rest of the story comes later with revising."
- Mark Twain
Creativity
"Some books should be tasted, some devoured, but only a few should be chewed and digested thoroughly."
- Sir Francis Bacon
Inspiration
"I guess there are never enough books."
- John Steinbeck
Contentment
"Classic’ – a book which people praise and don’t read."
- Mark Twain
Wisdom
"Many a book is like a key to unknown chambers within the castle of one's own self."
- Franz Kafka
Self-awareness
"Literature is the most agreeable way of ignoring life."
- Fernando Pessoa
Contentment
"Give weather reports. It helps the reality of a scene if foghorns are blowing or kites are in the sky on a windy afternoon or the day’s so hot wallpaper is peeling off the walls."
- Sid Fleischman
Creativity
"The difference between the right word and the almost right word is the difference between lightning and a lightning bug."
- Mark Twain
Creativity
"When you catch an adjective, kill it. No I don't mean utterly, but kill most of them — then the rest will be valuable."
- Oscar Wilde
Creativity
"The brain is like a muscle, and if you don't exercise it by reading and doing creative stuff, it'll get weak and mushy."
- Jeff Kinney
Health
"Reading only one book is like eating only one potato chip."
- Diane Duane
Inspiration
"If you want to write, you should pay attention to people — everybody has a story — and listen to people when they talk."
- Judy Blume
Creativity
"There are some books that reached through the noise of life to grab you by the collar and speak only of the truest things."
- Jeffrey Eugenides
Inspiration
"Ideas are the cheapest part of the writing. They are free! The hard part is what you do with the ideas you have gathered."
- Jane Yolen
Creativity
"I used to walk to school with my nose buried in a book."
- Coolio
Education
"I don't read a book; I hold a conversation with the author."
- Elbert Hubbard
Connection to Earth
"Books are, let's face it, better than everything else."
- Nick Hornby
Inspiration
"Reading is an active, imaginative act; it takes work."
- Khaled Hosseini
Creativity
"Think before you speak. Read before you think."
- Fran Lebowitz
Awareness
"Have books ‘happened’ to you? Unless your answer to that question is ‘yes,’ I’m unsure how to talk to you."
- Haruki Murakami
Inspiration
"Let’s be reasonable and add an eighth day to the week that is devoted exclusively to reading."
- Lena Dunham
Inspiration
"Outside of a dog, a book is a man's best friend. Inside of a dog, it's too dark to read."
- Groucho Marx
Contentment
"The best books... are those that tell you what you know already."
- George Orwell
Insight
"Isn't it odd how much fatter a book gets when you've read it several times?"
- Cornelia Funke
Reflection
"A book is like a garden, carried in the pocket."
- Proverb, unknown origin
Contentment
"Reading is not optional."
Motivation
"Books break your heart and then put it back together again, but better than it was before."
Healing
"Don’t give up reading, the more you practice, the easier it will get."
Motivation