"Books are the plane, and the train, and the road. They are the destination, and the journey. They are home."
- Anna Quindlen
Inspiration
"Today a reader, tomorrow a leader."
- Margaret Fuller
Education
"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
"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
"Books are a uniquely portable magic."
- Stephen King
Inspiration
"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
"Books and doors are the same thing. You open them, and you go through into another world."
- Jeanette Winterson
Imagination
"We read to know we are not alone."
- C.S. Lewis
Connection to Earth
"Once you learn to read, you will be forever free."
- Frederick Douglass
Empowerment
"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
"A room without books is like a body without a soul."
- Cicero
Inspiration
"That’s the thing about books. They let you travel without moving your feet."
- Jhumpa Lahiri
Imagination
"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
"You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read."
- James Baldwin
Healing
"Reading is important. If you know how to read, then the whole world opens up to you."
- Barack Obama
Education
"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
"Books may well be the only true magic."
- Alice Hoffman
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
"A reader lives a thousand lives before he dies... The man who never reads lives only one."
- George R.R. 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 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
"One must always be careful of books, and what is inside them, for words have the power to change us."
- Cassandra Clare
Awareness
"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
"You will learn most things by looking, but reading gives understanding. Reading will make you free."
- Paul Rand
Education
"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
Contentment
"What I love most about reading: It gives you the ability to reach higher ground. And keep climbing."
- Oprah
Aspirations
"Books are a form of political action. Books are knowledge. Books are reflection. Books change your mind."
- Toni Morrison
Empowerment
"I have challenged myself that I will read thousands of books and I will empower myself with knowledge. Pens and books are the weapons that defeat terrorism."
- Malala Yousafzai
Empowerment
"Reading is to the mind what exercise is to the body."
- Richard Steele
Health
"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
"One of the many gifts that books give readers is a connection to each other. When we share an affection for a writer, an author or a story, we also have a better understanding of people unlike ourselves. Books cultivate empathy."
- Sarah Jessica Parker
Empathy
"All good books are alike in that they are truer than if they had really happened, and after you are finished reading one, you will feel that all that happened to you and afterwards it all belongs to you; the good and the bad, the ecstasy, the remorse and sorrow, the people and the places and how the weather was."
- Ernest Hemingway
Connection to Earth
"There are many little ways to enlarge your child’s world. Love of books is the best of all."
- Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis
Aspirations
"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
"Any book that helps a child to form a habit of reading, to make reading one of his deep and continuing needs, is good for him."
- Maya Angelou
Education
"Not all readers are leaders, but all leaders are readers."
- Harry S. Truman
Leadership
"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
"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
"The more that you read, the more things you will know. The more you learn, the more places you’ll go."
- Dr. Seuss
Education
"There are many little ways to enlarge your world. Love of books is the best of all."
- Jacqueline Kennedy
Growth
"There is more treasure in books than in all the pirate’s loot on Treasure Island."
- Walt Disney
Aspirations
"A book is made from a tree. It is an assemblage of flat, flexible parts (still called “leaves”) imprinted with dark pigmented squiggles. One glance at it and you hear the voice of another person, perhaps someone dead for thousands of years. Across the millennia, the author is speaking, clearly and silently, inside your head, directly to you. Writing is perhaps the greatest of human inventions, binding together people, citizens of distant epochs, who never knew one another. Books break the shackles of time—proof that humans can work magic."
- Carl Sagan
Wisdom
"A parent or a teacher has only his lifetime; a good book can teach forever."
- Louis L’Amour
Education
"Reading is important, because if you can read, you can learn anything about everything and everything about anything."
- Tomie dePaola
Education
"I would be most content if my children grew up to be the kind of people who think decorating consists mostly of building enough bookshelves."
- Anna Quindlen
Family
"Wear the old coat and buy the new book."
- Austin Phelps
Aspirations
"I will defend the importance of bedtime stories to my last gasp."
- JK Rowling
Family
"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
Empowerment
"I have always imagined that paradise will be a kind of library."
- Jorge Luis Borges
Imagination
"To read is to fly: it is to soar to a point of vantage which gives a view over wide terrains of history, human variety, ideas, shared experience and the fruits of many inquiries."
- A.C. Grayling
Wisdom
"There are worse crimes than burning books. One of them is not reading them."
- Ray Bradbury
Awareness
"Either write something worth reading or do something worth writing."
- Benjamin Franklin
Creativity
"The whole world opened up to me when I learned to read."
- Mary McLeod Bethune
Empowerment
"Reading should not be presented to children as a chore, a duty. It should be offered as a gift."
- Kate DiCamillo
Education
"A children’s story that can only be enjoyed by children is not a good children’s story in the slightest."
- C.S. Lewis
Education
"Books are mirrors: You only see in them what you already have inside you."
- Carlos Ruiz Zafón
Self-awareness
"If you don’t like to read, you haven’t found the right book."
- J.K. Rowling
Education
"I can feel infinitely alive curled up on the sofa reading a book."
- Benedict Cumberbatch
Happiness
"Some books leave us free and some books make us free."
- Ralph Waldo Emerson
Empowerment
"If you are going to get anywhere in life you have to read a lot of books."
- Roald Dahl
Success
"We tell ourselves stories in order to live."
- Joan Didion
Inspiration
"Books are, let's face it, better than everything else."
- Nick Hornby
Inspiration
"Always read something that will make you look good if you die in the middle of it."
- P.J. O’Rourke
Inspiration
"As you read a book word by word and page by page, you participate in its creation."
- Ursula K. Le Guin
Creativity
"Read a lot. Expect something big, something exalting or deepening from a book."
- Susan Sontag
Education
"Let children read whatever they want and then talk about it with them."
- Judy Blume
Education
"Literature is the safe and traditional vehicle through which we learn about the world and pass on values from one generation to the next."
- Laurie Anderson
Education
"I wouldn't be a songwriter if 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
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
"The reading of all good books is like a conversation with the finest minds of past centuries."
- Rene Descartes
Education
"Reading is a form of prayer, a guided meditation that briefly makes us believe we’re someone else."
- George Saunders
Meditation
"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
"I guess a big part of serious fiction’s purpose is to give the reader, who like all of us is sort of marooned in her own skull, to give her imaginative access to other selves."
- David Foster Wallace
Empathy
"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
"I kept always two books in my pocket, one to read, one to write in."
- Robert Louis Stevenson
Creativity
"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
"The greatest gift is a passion for reading."
- Elizabeth Hardwick
Aspirations
"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 an active, imaginative act; it takes work."
- Khaled Hosseini
Creativity
"It is known that reading quickens the growth of a heart like nothing else."
- Catherynne M. Valente
Growth
"Some books are so familiar that reading them is like being home again."
- Louisa May Alcott
Happiness
"Reading without reflecting is like eating without digesting."
- Edmund Burke
Reflection
"The reading of all good books is like conversation with the finest (people) of the past centuries."
- Rene Descartes
Knowledge
"Books have a unique way of stopping time in a particular moment and saying: Let's not forget this."
- Dave Eggers
Inspiration
"The best books... are those that tell you what you know already."
- George Orwell
Insight
"Many a book is like a key to unknown chambers within the castle of one's own self."
- Franz Kafka
Self-awareness
"There is a wonder in reading Braille that the sighted will never know: to touch words and have them touch you back."
- Jim Fiebig
Empathy
"Books can be dangerous. The best ones should be labelled 'This could change your life.'"
- Helen Exley
Inspiration
"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
"It is chiefly through books that we enjoy intercourse with superior minds. In the best books great men talk to us, give us their most precious thoughts, and pour their souls into ours."
- William Ellery Channing
Inspiration
"Reading is essential for those who seek to rise above the ordinary."
- Jim Rohn
Ambition
"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 house without books is like a room without windows."
- Heinrich Mann
Contentment
"A book is a gift you can open again and again."
- Garrison Kellor
Inspiration
"Once you've read a book you care about, some part of it is always with you."
- Louis L'Amour
Personal Growth
"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
"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
Creativity
"It is books that are the key to the wide world; if you can’t do anything else, read all that you can."
- Jane Hamilton
Education
"There is no friend as loyal as a book."
- Ernest Hemingway
Inspiration
"A person who won’t read has no advantage over one who can’t read."
- Mark Twain
Education
"If we encounter a man of rare intellect, we should ask him what books he reads."
- Ralph Waldo Emerson
Knowledge
"I’ve always thought that a good book should be either the entry point inward, to learn about yourself, or a door outward, to open you up to new worlds."
- Taylor Jenkins Reid
Personal Growth
"I'm reading so much and exposing myself to so many new ideas. It almost feels like the chemistry and the structure of my brain is changing so rapidly sometimes."
- Emma Watson
Growth
"Comics are a gateway drug to literacy."
- Art Spiegelman
Education
"He that loves reading has everything within his reach."
- William Godwin
Knowledge
"Let us read and let us dance—two amusements that will never do any harm to the world."
- Voltaire
Happiness
"Reading is a discount ticket to everywhere."
- Mary Schmich
Aspirations
"Reading gives us someplace to go when we have to stay where we are."
- Mason Cooley
Inspiration
"Books can be dangerous. The best ones should be labeled “This could change your life.”"
- Helen Exley
Transformation
"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
"Reading for me is spending time with a friend."
- Gary Paulsen
Inspiration
"Just the knowledge that a good book is awaiting one at the end of a long day makes that day happier."
- Kathleen Norris
Happiness
"Reading furnishes the mind only with materials of knowledge; it is thinking that makes what we read ours."
- John Locke
Knowledge
"A word after a word after a word is power."
- Margaret Atwood
Creativity
"Some books should be tasted, some devoured, but only a few should be chewed and digested thoroughly."
- Sir Francis Bacon
Inspiration
"It is really hard to be lonely very long in a world of words."
- Naomi Shihab Nye
Connection to Earth
"I don't read a book; I hold a conversation with the author."
- Elbert Hubbard
Connection to Earth
"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
"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
"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
"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
"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
"The reason that fiction is more interesting than any other form of literature, to those who really like to study people, is that in fiction the author can really tell the truth without humiliating himself."
- Eleanor Roosevelt
Insight
"If you would tell me the heart of a man, tell me not what he reads, but what he rereads."
- François Mauriac
Self-awareness
"A child who carries a book with a bookmark in it is in two places at the same time."
- Tony Abbott
Imagination
"Think before you speak. Read before you think."
- Fran Lebowitz
Awareness
"A book lying idle on a shelf is wasted ammunition. Like money, books must be kept in constant circulation."
- Henry Miller
Responsibility
"I love the way that each book — any book — is its own journey. You open it, and off you go…"
- Sharon Creech
Inspiration
"Isn't it odd how much fatter a book gets when you've read it several times?"
- Cornelia Funke
Reflection
"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
"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
"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
"Let’s be reasonable and add an eighth day to the week that is devoted exclusively to reading."
- Lena Dunham
Inspiration
"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
Personal Growth
"Have books ‘happened’ to you? Unless your answer to that question is ‘yes,’ I’m unsure how to talk to you."
- Haruki Murakami
Inspiration
"Books are lighthouses erected in the great sea of time."
- E.P. Whipple
Imagination
"Reading is the special key to take you where you want to be."
Inspiration
"Don’t give up reading, the more you practice, the easier it will get."
Motivation
"A book is valuable chiefly for its power to inspire."
Inspiration
"Don’t give up reading. The more you practise, the easier it will get."
Inspiration
"If you don’t read you perish. If you read you control those that don’t read."
Inspiration
"Everyone is a reader, some just haven’t found their favourite book yet."
Inspiration
"Reading is your first step to travel the world!"
Inspiration
"The beauty of life is to read a book and to share that treasure with others."
Inspiration