Timeless Inspiration: A Curated Collection of the Most Inspiring Quotes on Reading

"I have not failed. I've just found 10,000 ways that won't work."

- Thomas A. Edison

"Success is not final, failure is not fatal: it is the courage to continue that counts."

- Winston Churchill

"You have brains in your head. You have feet in your shoes. You can steer yourself any direction you choose. You're on your own. And you know what you know. And YOU are the one who'll decide where to go..."

- Dr. Seuss

"This life is what you make it. No matter what, you're going to mess up sometimes, it's a universal truth. But the good part is you get to decide how you're going to mess it up. Girls will be your friends - they'll act like it anyway. But just remember, some come, some go. The ones that stay with you through everything - they're your true best friends. Don't let go of them. Also remember, sisters make the best friends in the world. As for lovers, well, they'll come and go too. And baby, I hate to say it, most of them - actually pretty much all of them are going to break your heart, but you can't give up because if you give up, you'll never find your soulmate. You'll never find that half who makes you whole and that goes for everything. Just because you fail once, doesn't mean you're gonna fail at everything. Keep trying, hold on, and always, always, always believe in yourself, because if you don't, then who will, sweetie? So keep your head high, keep your chin up, and most importantly, keep smiling, because life's a beautiful thing and there's so much to smile about."

- Marilyn Monroe

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

- Dr. Seuss

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

- George R.R. Martin

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

- Ray Bradbury

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

- Cicero

"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

"A book is the most effective weapon against intolerance and ignorance."

- Lyndon Baines Johnson

"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

"Do what you can, with what you have, where you are."

- Theodore Roosevelt

"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

"Life isn't about finding yourself. Life is about creating yourself."

- George Bernard Shaw

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

- Malorie Blackman

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

- Kate DiCamillo

"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

"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

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

- Roald Dahl

"Everything you can imagine is real."

- Pablo Picasso

"It is never too late to be what you might have been."

- George Eliot

"I am enough of an artist to draw freely upon my imagination. Imagination is more important than knowledge. Knowledge is limited. Imagination encircles the world."

- Albert Einstein

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

- Jeanette Winterson

"Every reader finds himself. The writer’s work is merely a kind of optical instrument that makes it possible for the reader to discern what, without this book, he would perhaps never have seen in himself."

- Marcel Proust

"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

"Yesterday is history, tomorrow is a mystery, today is a gift of God, which is why we call it the present."

- Bill Keane

"There are only two ways to live your life. One is as though nothing is a miracle. The other is as though everything is a miracle."

- Albert Einstein

"Imperfection is beauty, madness is genius and it's better to be absolutely ridiculous than absolutely boring."

- Marilyn Monroe

"Be the change that you wish to see in the world."

- Mahatma Gandhi

"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've gotta dance like there's nobody watching, Love like you'll never be hurt, Sing like there's nobody listening, And live like it's heaven on earth."

- William W. Purkey

"Be yourself; everyone else is already taken."

- Oscar Wilde

"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

"Today a reader, tomorrow a leader."

- Margaret Fuller

"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

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

- Malcolm X

"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

"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

"No matter how busy you may think you are, you must find time for reading, or surrender yourself to self-chosen ignorance."

- Confucius

"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

"Reading is a basic tool in the living of a good life."

- Mortimer Adler

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

- Victor Hugo

"Literacy is a bridge from misery to hope."

- Kofi Annan

"A capacity and taste for reading gives access to whatever has already been discovered by others."

- Abraham Lincoln

"Books are a uniquely portable magic."

- Stephen King

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

- Harry Truman

"You may say I'm a dreamer, but I'm not the only one. I hope someday you'll join us. And the world will live as one."

- John Lennon

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

- George R.R. Martin

"And, when you want something, all the universe conspires in helping you to achieve it."

- Paulo Coelho

"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

"Listen to the mustn'ts, child. Listen to the don'ts. Listen to the shouldn'ts, the impossibles, the won'ts. Listen to the never haves, then listen close to me... Anything can happen, child. Anything can be."

- Shel Silverstein

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

- Tomie dePaola

"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 one door of happiness closes, another opens; but often we look so long at the closed door that we do not see the one which has been opened for us."

- Helen Keller

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

- Frederick Douglass

"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

"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

"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

"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

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

- Carlos Ruiz Zafón

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

- Fran Lebowitz

"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

"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

"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

"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

"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

"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

"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

"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

"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

"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

"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

"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

"The greatest gift is a passion for reading."

- Elizabeth Hardwick

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

- Heinrich Mann

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

- Harper Lee

"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

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

- George Bernard Shaw

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

- Emily Dickinson

"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

"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

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

- Anna Quindlen

"I lived in books more than I lived anywhere else."

- Neil Gaiman

"If there's a book that you want to read, but it hasn't been written yet, then you must write it."

- Toni Morrison

"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

"The great thing about reading is that it broadens your life."

- George RR Martin

"I cannot live without books."

- Thomas Jefferson

"We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars."

- Oscar Wilde

"The opposite of love is not hate, it's indifference. The opposite of art is not ugliness, it's indifference. The opposite of faith is not heresy, it's indifference. And the opposite of life is not death, it's indifference."

- Elie Wiesel

"The best advice I ever got was that knowledge is power and to keep reading."

- David Bailey

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

- Mary McLeod Bethune

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

- Richard Steele

"Reading gives us someplace to go when we have to stay where we are."

- Mason Cooley

"When we read a story, we inhabit it. The covers of the book are like a roof and four walls. What is to happen next will take place within the four walls of the story. And this is possible because the story’s voice makes everything its own."

- John Berger

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

- Vera Nazarian

"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

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

- E.P. Whipple

"Reading takes us away from home, but more important, it finds homes for us everywhere."

- Hazel Rochman

"Reading will give you lasting pleasure."

- Laura Bush

"To survive, we must tell stories."

- Umberto Eco

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

- William Godwin

"A book is the only place in which you can examine a fragile thought without breaking it, or explore an explosive idea without fear it will go off in your face. It is one of the few havens remaining where a person’s mind can get both provocation and privacy."

- Edward P. Morgan

"Read in order to live."

- Gustave Flaubert

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

- Kathleen Norris

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

- Ray Bradbury

"It is well to read everything of something, and something of everything."

- Lord Henry P. Brougham

"Reading is a discount ticket to everywhere."

- Mary Schmich

"In the highest civilization, the book is still the highest delight. He who has once known its satisfactions is provided with a resource against calamity."

- Ralph Waldo Emerson

"A truly great book should be read in youth, again in maturity and once more in old age, as a fine building should be seen by morning light, at noon and by moonlight."

- Robertson Davies

"A good book is the best of friends, the same today and forever."

- Martin Tupper

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

- Jorge Luis Borges

"Choose an author as you choose a friend."

- Sir Christopher Wren

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

- Jean Rhys

"Some parents feel that reading a picture book to their child in an animated and child-like way somehow renders them immature and unrefined. Being that the ability to read is the most prized intellectual skill anyone can possess, and if readers really are born on the laps of their parents, then I would say that reading to your child in that way is the most grown-up and sophisticated thing that a parent could do."

- LBC

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

- Garrison Kellor

"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

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

- George Orwell

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

- Dave Eggers

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

- Louisa May Alcott

"No entertainment is so cheap as reading, nor any pleasure so lasting. She will not want new fashions nor regret the loss of expensive diversions or variety of company if she can be amused with an author in her closet."

- Lady Montagu

"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

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

- Charles Baudelaire

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

- Aldous Huxley

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

- Elbert Hubbard

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

- Walt Disney

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

- Robert Louis Stevenson

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

- François Mauriac

"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

"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

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

- Catherynne M. Valente

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

- Khaled Hosseini

"There are no faster or firmer friendships than those formed between people who love the same books."

- Irving Stone

"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

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

- Emma Thompson

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

- Oscar Wilde

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

- Sharon Creech

"Of all the diversions of life, there is none so proper to fill up its empty spaces as the reading of useful and entertaining authors."

- Joseph Addison

"Reading only one book is like eating only one potato chip."

- Diane Duane

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

- P.J. O’Rourke

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

- Benjamin Franklin

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

- Groucho Marx

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

- Sir Francis Bacon

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

- Haruki Murakami

"Sleep is good, and books are better."

- George RR Martin

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

- Benedict Cumberbatch

"but for my own part, if a book is well written, I always find it too short."

- Jane Austen

"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

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

- Lemony Snicket

"I guess there are never enough books."

- John Steinbeck

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

- JK Rowling

"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

"So, this is my life. And I want you to know that I am both happy and sad and I'm still trying to figure out how that could be."

- Stephen Chbosky

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

- Mark Twain

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

- Lena Dunham

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

- C.S. Lewis

"A good [short story] would take me out of myself and then stuff me back in, outsized, now, and uneasy with the fit."

- David Sedaris

"I must say that I find television very educational. The minute somebody turns it on, I go to the library and read a book."

- Groucho Marx

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

- Groucho Marx

"Books break your heart and then put it back together again, but better than it was before."

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

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

"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."

"Reading is brain food."

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

"They do not live that do not read."

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