50 Inspiring Quotes to Ignite Your Love for Reading

"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

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

- Cassandra Clare

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

- Margaret Atwood

"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

"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."

- Mary Ann Shaffer

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

- Napoleon Bonaparte

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

- Charles Baudelaire

"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

"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

"Today a reader, tomorrow a leader."

- Margaret Fuller

"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

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

- Lena Dunham

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

- J.K. Rowling

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

- Benedict Cumberbatch

"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."

- 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

"A good book should take me out of myself and then stuff me back in, outsized, now, and uneasy with the fit."

- David Sedaris

"Books are, let's face it, better than everything else."

- Nick Hornby

"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."

- Ursula K. Le Guin

"It is really hard to be lonely very long in a world of words."

- Naomi Shihab Nye

"Read a lot. Expect something big, something exalting or deepening from a book."

- Susan Sontag

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

- Haruki Murakami

"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

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

- Frederick Douglass

"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."

- 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."

- René Descartes

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

- Jhumpa Lahiri

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

- Sharon Creech

"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."

- George Saunders

"I guess a big part of serious fiction’s purpose is to give the reader... 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."

- 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."

- Roxane Gay

"You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read."

- 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."

- 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."

- 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

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

- Louisa May Alcott

"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."

- 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

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

- Madeleine L'Engle

"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?"

- 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."

- 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."

- Alan Bennett

"Reading is essential for those who seek to rise above 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

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

- George R.R. Martin

"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

""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

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

- Dr. Seuss

"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

"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

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

- Carl Sagan

"Books are a uniquely portable magic."

- Stephen King

"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

""Books shouldn’t be daunting, they should be funny, exciting and wonderful; and learning to be a reader gives a terrific advantage.""

- Roald Dahl

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

- Barack Obama

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

- George Bernard Shaw

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

- J.K. Rowling

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

- Anna Quindlen

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

- Marcel Proust

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

- Heinrich Mann

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

- Kathleen Norris

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

- Jorge Luis Borges

"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

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

- Neil Gaiman

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

- Frederick Douglass

""Literacy is a bridge from misery to hope.""

- Kofi Annan

"I cannot live without books."

- Thomas Jefferson

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

- George R.R. Martin

"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 R.R. Martin

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

- Toni Morrison

""Reading is still the main way I both learn new things and test my understanding.""

- Bill Gates

""The purpose of reading is not just raw knowledge. It’s that it is part of the human experience. It helps you find meaning, understand yourself, and make your life better.""

- Ryan Holiday

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

- Garrison Keillor

""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

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

- Oscar Wilde

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

- George R.R. Martin

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

- Mary McLeod Bethune

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

- Irving Stone

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

- Jim Rohn

""Books are a uniquely portable magic.""

- Stephen King

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

- Malcolm X

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

- J.K. Rowling

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

- Mark Twain

"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

""Reading an hour a day is only 4% of your day. But that 4% will put you in the top of your field within 10 years. Find the time.""

- Patrick Bet David

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

- William Styron

""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.""

- Katherine Patterson

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

- Rumer Godden

""We read to know we are not alone.""

- C.S. Lewis

""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

"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

"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

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

- Garrison Keillor

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

- Dave Eggers

"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

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

- Judy Blume

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

- Napoleon Bonaparte

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

- Harper Lee

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

- Richard Steele

""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

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

- Abraham Lincoln

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

- C.S. Lewis

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

- Harry Truman

"Read, read, read."

- William Faulkner

"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

""Books are the training weights of the mind.""

- Epictetus

""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

""Books hold most of the secrets of the world, most of the thoughts that men and women have had.""

- E.B. White

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

- Voltaire

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

- Descartes

""The leader who intends to grow spiritually and intellectually must be reading constantly.""

- J. Oswald Sanders

"Sleep is good, and books are better."

- George R.R. Martin

""Read books that are relevant to what you want to achieve and reading will never seem boring.""

- James Clear

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

- Lemony Snicket

""Reading a book is among the most high-leverage activities on earth.""

- Greg McKeown

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

- Diane Duane

""Reading can teach you the best of what others already know. Reflection can teach you the best of what only you can know.""

- James Clear

""If you’re overthinking, write. If you’re underthinking, read.""

- Alex Wieckowski

""Material wealth starts with mental wealth. Build a better mind, get a better life.""

- Orange Book

""Reading speed is nothing more than signaling. Skim broadly to find something worth reading. Then dive in slowly and deeply. It’s not how fast you read but what you absorb that matters.""

- Shane Parrish

""Unless our reading includes serious thinking it is wasted time.""

- J. Oswald Sanders

""Books are more likely to change minds than conversations.""

- James Clear

""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

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

- Groucho Marx

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

- Austin Phelps

""A child who carries a book with a bookmark in it is in two places at the same time.""

- Tony Abbott

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

- Benjamin Franklin

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

- C.S. Lewis

""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

"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

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

- Emily Dickinson

""The paradox of reading: The books you read will profoundly change you even though you’ll forget the vast majority of what you read.""

- David Perell

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

- Jim Fiebig

""Your mind will give back to you exactly what you put into it.""

- John Maxwell

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

- Groucho Marx

"Comics are a gateway drug to literacy."

- Art Spiegelman

""I guess there are never enough books.""

- John Steinbeck

""If we read merely to stock our head with ideas, to feel superior to others, or to appear learned, then our reading is useless and vain.""

- J. Oswald Sanders

""Books are an investment, not an expense.""

- Alex Wieckowski

""The books that make you feel dumb are often the ones that make you smarter.""

- Alex Wieckowski

""One sign you haven’t done enough reading is if you find yourself agreeing with whatever book you read last.""

- James Clear

""Read to collect the dots, write to connect them.""

- David Perell

""You are what you read.""

- Alex Wieckowski

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

- Mark Twain

"If you are fortunate to be a good reader, you can try to help other children in need."

"Reading is Fundamental. In fact, it is one of the most important ingredients to becoming all that you can be. Reading develops your brain, provides a window into the world around you and helps you do better in all school subjects. Most importantly, reading can not only help you become a better student, but a better person. You can learn from the brightest people whenever and wherever you choose."

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

"Think about what you can do to improve your own reading."

"Not all children are provided with an equal chance to read."

""Don’t give up reading, the more you practice, the easier it will get.""

"Unite, with some folks you are sure to know!"