100 Inspirational Reading Quotes to Ignite Your Love for Books

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

- Dr. Seuss

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

- Dr. Seuss

"One book, one pen, one child, and one teacher can change the world."

- Malala Yousafzai

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

- Tomie dePaola

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

- Dr. Seuss

"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

"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

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

- Barack Obama

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

- Dr. Seuss

"Reading is a discount ticket to everywhere."

- Mary Schmich

"To learn to read is to light a fire."

- Victor Hugo

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

- Frederick Douglass

"Books are a uniquely portable magic."

- Stephen King

"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

"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

"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

"Today a reader, tomorrow a leader."

- Margaret Fuller

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

- Helen Exley

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

- Malorie Blackman

"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

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

- J.K. Rowling

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

- George R.R. Martin

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

- Ralph Waldo Emerson

"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

"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

"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

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

- Jeanette Winterson

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

- Barack Obama

"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

"We read to know we are not alone."

- C.S. Lewis

"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

"Books break the shackles of time – proof that humans can work magic."

- Carl Sagan

"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

"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

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

- George R.R. Martin

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

- Harper Lee

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

- Walt Disney

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

- Malcolm X

"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

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

- Emily Dickinson

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

- Jacqueline Kennedy

"Reading without reflecting is like eating without digesting."

- Edmund Burke

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

- Richard Steele

"Books train your mind to imagination to think big."

- Taylor Swift

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

- Roald Dahl

"The whole world opened up to me when I learned to read."

- Mary McLeod Bethune

"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

"Books allowed me to see a world beyond the front porch of my grandmother’s shotgun house…[and] the power to see possibilities beyond what was allowed at the time."

- Oprah Winfrey

"I think it’s the books that you read when you’re young that live with you forever."

- J.K. Rowling

"Readers are lucky – they will never be bored or lonely."

- Natalie Babbitt

"I had a lot of dreams when I was a kid, and I think a great deal of that grew out of the fact that I had a chance to read a lot."

- Bill Gates

"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

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

- Jim Rohn

"Books are the mirrors of the soul."

- Virginia Woolf

"To read is to voyage through time."

- Carl Sagan

"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

"Reading, for me, is spending time with a friend."

- Gary Paulsen

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

- Judy Blume

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

- Rumer Godden

"If you want your children to be intelligent, read them fairy tales. If you want them to be more intelligent, read them more fairy tales."

- Albert Einstein

"From an early age, books were my constant companions and my local library, a place I could find a new friend on every shelf."

- Sarah Jessica Parker

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

- Louis L'Amour

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

- C.S. Lewis

"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

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

- Lady Montagu

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

- Heinrich Mann

"The greatest gift is a passion for reading."

- Elizabeth Hardwick

"I’m old-fashioned and think that reading books is the most glorious pastime that humankind has yet devised."

- Wisława Szymborska

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

- Ray Bradbury

"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

"Wherever I go, bookstores are still the closest thing to a town square."

- Gloria Steinem

"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

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

- William Godwin

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

- George Bernard Shaw

"The only way to do all the things you’d like to do is to read."

- Tom Clancy

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

- Robert Louis Stevenson

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

- Jorge Luis Borges

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

- Margaret Atwood

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

- Napoleon Bonaparte

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

- Kate DiCamillo

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

- Carlos Ruiz Zafón

"We tell ourselves stories in order to live."

- Joan Didion

"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

"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

"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

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

- Jhumpa Lahiri

"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

"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

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

- Madeleine L'Engle

"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

"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

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

- Garrison Kellor

"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

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

- JK Rowling

"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

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

- W. Somerset Maugham

"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

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

- Fran Lebowitz

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

- Dave Eggers

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

- Kathleen Norris

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

- Emma Thompson

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

- Charles Baudelaire

"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

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

- Elbert Hubbard

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

- Louisa May Alcott

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

- Sir Francis Bacon

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

- Rene Descartes

"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

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

- Lemony Snicket

"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

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

- Benjamin Franklin

"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

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

- Abraham Lincoln

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

- Mark Twain

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

- P.J. O’Rourke

"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

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

- Mark Twain

"I guess there are never enough books."

- John Steinbeck

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

- Austin Phelps

"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

"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

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

- Benedict Cumberbatch

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

- Lena Dunham

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

- Groucho Marx

"Luckily, I always travel with a book, just in case I have to wait in line for Santa, or some such inconvenience."

- David Levithan

"The beauty of life is to read a book and to share that treasure with others."

"Readers are actually great leaders. If the clothes you wear are far more costly than the books you buy, then you are not ready for any form of personal development."

"Readers are leaders. If the clothes you wear are more expensive than the books you read, then you are not ready for greatness."

"A book is valuable chiefly for its power to inspire."

"Reading is brain food."

"It is only through reading that we can be freed from the bondage of our ignorance."

"They do not live that do not read."