Inspirational Reading Quotes: A Treasure Trove of Wisdom and Motivation

"A reader lives a thousand lives before he dies . . . The man who never reads lives only one."

- George R.R. Martin

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

- Dr. Seuss

"Once you learn to read, you will be forever free."

- Frederick Douglass

"Today a reader, tomorrow a leader."

- Margaret Fuller

"Not all readers are leaders, but all leaders are readers."

- Harry S. Truman

"Reading is the gateway skill that makes all other learning possible."

- Barack Obama

"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

"Read. Read anything. Read the things they say are good for you, and the things they claim are junk. You'll find what you need to find. Just read."

- Neil Gaiman

"You will learn most things by looking, but reading gives understanding. Reading will make you free."

- Paul Rand

"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

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

- Henry David Thoreau

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

- Oprah

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

- Ralph Waldo Emerson

"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

"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

"Books are a form of political action. Books are knowledge. Books are reflection. Books change your mind."

- Toni Morrison

"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

"Reading is a discount ticket to everywhere."

- Mary Schmich

"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

"Books can be dangerous. The best ones should be labeled “This could change your life.”"

- Helen Exley

"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

"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

"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

"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

"For some of us, books are as important as almost anything else on earth. What a miracle it is that out of these small, flat, rigid squares of paper unfolds world after world after world, worlds that sing to you, comfort and quiet or excite you, books help us understand who we are and how we are to behave. They show us what community and friendship mean; they show us how to live and die."

- Anne Lamott

"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

"Let children read whatever they want and then talk about it with them."

- Judy Blume

"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

"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

"I would do that again by reading, just as I did when I was young"

- Maya Angelou

"The reading of all good books is like conversation with the finest (people) of the past centuries."

- Rene 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

"Reading should not be presented to children as a chore, a duty. It should be offered as a gift."

- Kate DiCamillo

"I think books are like people, in the sense that they’ll turn up in your life when you most need them."

- Emma Thompson

"Books are a uniquely portable magic."

- Stephen King

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

- Carlos Ruiz Zafón

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

- Jhumpa Lahiri

"A word after a word after a word is power."

- Margaret Atwood

"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

"When you learn to read you will be born again…and you will never be quite so alone again."

- Rumer Godden

"So it is with children who learn to read fluently and well: They begin to take flight into whole new worlds as effortlessly as young birds take to the sky."

- William James

"There are many little ways to enlarge your child’s world. Love of books is the best of all."

- Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis

"There are perhaps no days of our childhood we lived so fully as those we spent with a favorite book."

- Marcel Proust

"Fairy tales in childhood are stepping stones throughout life, leading the way through trouble and trial. The value of fairy tales lies not in a brief literary escape from reality, but in the gift of hope that goodness truly is more powerful than evil and that even the darkest reality can lead to a Happily Ever After. Do not take that gift of hope lightly. It has the power to conquer despair in the midst of sorrow, to light the darkness in the valleys of life, to whisper “One more time” in the face of failure. Hope is what gives life to dreams, making the fairy tale the reality."

- L.R. Knost

"Read, read, read."

- William Faulkner

"Read. Everything you can get your hands on. Read until words become your friends. Then when you need to find one, they will jump into your mind, waving their hands for you to pick them. And you can select whichever you like, just like a captain choosing a stickball team."

- Karen Witemeyer

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

- Richard Steele

"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

"A house without books is like a room without windows."

- Heinrich Mann

"A parent or a teacher has only his lifetime; a good book can teach forever."

- Louis L’Amour

"Reading is important, because if you can read, you can learn anything about everything and everything about anything."

- Tomie dePaola

"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

"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

"A person who won’t read has no advantage over one who can’t read."

- Mark Twain

"He that loves reading has everything within his reach."

- William Godwin

"Let us read and let us dance—two amusements that will never do any harm to the world."

- Voltaire

"I will defend the importance of bedtime stories to my last gasp."

- JK Rowling

"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

"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

"Either write something worth reading or do something worth writing."

- Benjamin Franklin

"There is more treasure in books than in all the pirate's loot on Treasure Island."

- Walt Disney

"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

"Books are the mirrors of the soul."

- Virginia Woolf

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

- John Locke

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

- Anna Quindlen

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

- Harper Lee

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

- J.K. Rowling

"Some books leave us free and some books make us free."

- Ralph Waldo Emerson

"Writing and reading decrease our sense of isolation. They deepen and widen and expand our sense of life: They feed the soul. When writers make us shake our heads with the exactness of their prose and their truths, and even make us laugh about ourselves or life, our buoyancy is restored. We are given a shot at dancing with, or at least clapping along with, the absurdity of life, instead of being squashed by it over and over again. It's like singing on a boat during a terrible storm at sea. You can't stop the raging storm, but singing can change the hearts and spirits of the people who are together on that ship."

- Anne Lamott

"We tell ourselves stories in order to live."

- Joan Didion

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

- Jeanette Winterson

"We read to know we are not alone."

- C.S. Lewis

"As you read a book word by word and page by page, you participate in its creation, just as a cellist playing a Bach suite participates, note by note, in the creation, the coming-to-be, the existence, of the music. And, as you read and re-read, the book of course participates in the creation of you, your thoughts and feelings, the size and temper of your soul."

- Ursula K. Le Guin

"It is really hard to be lonely very long in a world of words. Even if you don't have friends somewhere, you still have language, and it will find you and wrap its little syllables around you and suddenly there will be a story to live in."

- Naomi Shihab Nye

"Read a lot. Expect something big, something exalting or deepening from a book. No book is worth reading that isn't worth re-reading."

- Susan Sontag

"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

"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

"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. Following complex story lines stretches our brains beyond the 140 characters of sound-bite thinking, and staying within the world of a novel gives us the ability to be quiet and alone, two skills that are disappearing faster than the polar icecaps."

- Ann Patchett

"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

"A room without books is like a body without a soul."

- Cicero

"The reading of all good books is like a conversation with the finest minds of past centuries."

- Rene Descartes

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

- Malorie Blackman

"Reading is a form of prayer, a guided meditation that briefly makes us believe we’re someone else, disrupting the delusion that we’re permanent and at the center of the universe. Suddenly (we’re saved!) other people are real again, and we’re fond of them."

- George Saunders

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

- William Styron

"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

"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

"Reading makes immigrants of us all. It takes us away from home, but more important, it finds homes for us everywhere."

- Jean Rhys

"Salvation is certainly among the reasons I read. Reading and writing have always pulled me out of the darkest experiences in my life. Stories have given me a place in which to lose myself. They have allowed me to remember. They have allowed me to forget. They have allowed me to imagine different endings and better possible worlds."

- Roxane Gay

"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

"Reading is important. If you know how to read, then the whole world opens up to you."

- Barack Obama

"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

"We don’t need a list of rights and wrongs, tables of dos and don’ts: We need books, time, and silence. Thou shalt not is soon forgotten, but Once upon a time lasts forever."

- Philip Pullman

"Books may well be the only true magic."

- Alice Hoffman

"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

"A book lying idle on a shelf is wasted ammunition. Like money, books must be kept in constant circulation... A book is not only a friend, it makes friends for you. When you have possessed a book with mind and spirit, you are enriched. But when you pass it on, you are enriched threefold."

- Henry Miller

"Reading is an active, imaginative act; it takes work."

- Khaled Hosseini

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

- Catherynne M. Valente

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

- François Mauriac

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

- W. Somerset Maugham

"I don't read a book; I hold a conversation with the author."

- Elbert Hubbard

"A reader lives a thousand lives before he dies... The man who never reads lives only one."

- George R.R. Martin

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

- Sir Francis Bacon

"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

"Books have a unique way of stopping time in a particular moment and saying: Let's not forget this."

- Dave Eggers

"Isn't it odd how much fatter a book gets when you've read it several times? As if something were left between the pages every time you read it. Feelings, thoughts, sounds, smells... and then, when you look at the book again many years later, you find yourself there, too, a slightly younger self, slightly different, as if the book had preserved you like pressed flower... both strange and familiar."

- Cornelia Funke

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

- George Orwell

"Many a book is like a key to unknown chambers within the castle of one's own self."

- Franz Kafka

"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

"Books can be dangerous. The best ones should be labelled 'This could change your life.'"

- Helen Exley

"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

"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 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. Now here it is, set down by someone else, a person you have never met, someone even who is long dead. And it is as if a hand has come out and taken yours."

- Alan Bennett

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

- Jim Rohn

"The story is truly finished–and meaning is made–not when the author adds the last period, but when the reader enters."

- Celeste Ng

"One must always be careful of books, and what is inside them, for words have the power to change us."

- Cassandra Clare

"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

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

- Louis L'Amour

"The magic is only in what books say, how they stitched the patches of the universe together into one garment for us."

- Ray Bradbury

"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

"Literacy is a bridge from misery to hope."

- Kofi Annan

"Any book that helps a child to form a habit of reading, to make reading one of his needs, is good for him."

- Maya Angelou

"There is no such thing as a child who hates to read; there are only children who have not found the right book."

- Frank Serafini

"Children are made readers on the laps of their parents."

- Emilie Buchwald

"One of the greatest gifts adults can give—to their offspring and to their society—is to read to children."

- Carl Sagan

"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 Gillian

"Reading should not be presented to children as a chore or duty.  It should be offered to them as a precious gift."

- Kate DiCamillo

"Whenever you read a good book, somewhere in the world a door opens to allow in more light."

- Vera Nazarian

"There is no substitute for books in the life of a child."

- May Ellen Chase

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

- Victor Hugo

"It is not enough to simply teach children to read; we have to give them something worth reading. Something that will stretch their imaginations—something that will help them make sense of their own lives and encourage them to reach out toward people whose lives are quite different from their own."

- Katherine Patterson

"I have always imagined that paradise will be a kind of library."

- Jorge Luis Borges

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

- Napoleon Bonaparte

"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

"There is a wonder in reading Braille that the sighted will never know: to touch words and have them touch you back."

- Jim Fiebig

"A book is a gift you can open again and again."

- Garrison Kellor

"Just the knowledge that a good book is awaiting one at the end of a long day makes that day happier."

- Kathleen Norris

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

- Charles Baudelaire

"I love the way that each book — any book — is its own journey. You open it, and off you go…"

- Sharon Creech

"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

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

- Jane Austen

"Think before you speak. Read before you think."

- Fran Lebowitz

"A book, too, can be a star, a living fire to lighten the darkness, leading out into the expanding universe."

- Madeleine L'Engle

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

- Benedict Cumberbatch

"Literature is my Utopia."

- Helen Keller

"Books are, let's face it, better than everything else. If we played Cultural Fantasy Boxing League, and made books go fifteen rounds in the ring against the best that any other art form had to offer, then books would win pretty much every time."

- Nick Hornby

"Comics are a gateway drug to literacy."

- Art Spiegelman

"Have books ‘happened’ to you? Unless your answer to that question is ‘yes,’ I’m unsure how to talk to you."

- Haruki Murakami

"When you read a great book, you don't escape from life, you plunge deeper into it."

- Julian Barnes

"The man who does not read good books is no better than the man who can’t."

- Mark Twain

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

- Emily Dickinson

"In a good book room you feel in some mysterious way that you are absorbing the wisdom contained in all the books through your skin, without even opening them."

- Mark Twain

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

- C.S. Lewis

"I kept always two books in my pocket, one to read, one to write in."

- Robert Louis Stevenson

"We can't solve all problems with books and reading, but we can try to make sure all kids have access to book they can relate to and choose to read- to escape into a good story and help kids make sense of the world around them and their own feelings."

- Judy Newman

"I don't think there is such a thing as a bad book for children. It's tosh. It's snobbery and it's foolishness. We need our children to get onto the reading ladder: anything that they enjoy reading will move them up, rung by rung, into literacy."

- Neil Gaiman

"We shouldn't teach great books; we should teach a love of reading."

- B.F. Skinner

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

- Lloyd Alexander

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

- Malcolm X

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

- Dr. Seuss

"All the reading she had done had given her a view of life that they had never seen."

- Roald Dahl

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

- C.S. Lewis

"For my whole life, my favorite activity was reading. It’s not the most social pastime."

- Audrey Hepburn

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

- Walt Disney

"Make it a rule never to give a child a book you would not read yourself."

- George Bernard Shaw

"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

"The world belongs to those who read."

- Rick Holland

"Books, I found, had the power to make time stand still, retreat or fly into the future."

- Jim Bishop

"Books make great gifts because they have whole worlds inside of them."

- Kate DiCamillo

"Sleep is good. Books are better."

- George R.R. Martin

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

- Betty Smith

"I stepped into the bookstore and breathed in that perfume of paper and magic that strangely no one had ever thought of bottling."

- Carlos Ruiz Zafon

"We read to know we're not alone."

- William Nicholson

"A Child. A book. A read. A chat. This is the way the mind grows. Not with a test but a tale."

- Michael Rosen

"Reading forces you to be quiet in a world that no longer makes a place for that."

- John Green

"You can't get a cup of tea big enough or a book long enough to suit me."

- C.S.Lewis

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

- Lemony Snicket

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

- Lena Dunham

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

- Groucho Marx

"The greatest gift is a passion for reading."

- Elizabeth Hardwick

"I can survive well enough on my own – if given the proper reading material."

- Sarah J. Maas

"There is no friend as loyal as a book."

- Ernest Hemingway

"A lot of people ask me if I were shipwrecked and could only have one book, what would it be? I always say, “How to Build a Boat.”"

- Stephen Wright

"Always read something that will make you look good if you die in the middle of it."

- P.J. O’Rourke

"Some books are so familiar that reading them is like being home again."

- Louisa May Alcott

"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

"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

"The buying of more books than one can read is nothing less than the soul reaching toward infinity..."

- A. Edward Newton

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

- Groucho Marx

"It's always better to have too much to read than not enough."

- Ann Patchett

"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

"A writer only begins a book. A reader finishes it."

- Samuel Johnson

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

- Jane Smiley

"Buying a book is not about obtaining a possession... but about securing a portal."

- Laura Miller

"You simply never know what a child is going to find in a book."

- Lucy Mangan

"Books serve to show a man that those original thoughts of his aren’t very new after all."

- Abraham Lincoln

"Classic’ – a book which people praise and don’t read."

- Mark Twain

"The person who deserves most pity is a lonesome one on a rainy day who doesn’t know how to read."

- Benjamin Franklin

"A rainy day is a special gift to readers."

- Amy Miles

"In the winter she curls up around a good book and dreams away the cold."

- Ben Aaronovitch

"A book is like a garden carried in the pocket."

- Chinese Proverb

"What on earth could be more luxurious than a sofa, a book, and a cup of coffee?"

- Anthony Trollope

"I guess there are never enough books."

- John Steinbeck

"A child who reads will be an adult who thinks."

- Sasha Salmina

"Wear the old coat and buy the new book."

- Austin Phelps

"Books are lighthouses erected in the great sea of time."

- E.P. Whipple

"Close your eyes. Take a breath. Inhale calmness. Exhale stress. Make a cuppa. Sink into a chair. Pick up a book. Disappear."

"It's called reading. It's how people install new software into their brains."

"Sometimes you just need to lay on the couch and read for a couple of years."

"There is no app to replace your lap! Read to your child."

"There is only one thing that could replace a book: the next book."

"Bird have wings. Humans have books."

"Books. One of the few things you can buy that will make you richer."

"Books are not my whole life but they make my life whole."