“A reader lives a thousand lives before he dies. The [person] who never reads lives only one.” – George R. R. Martin
If you’re looking for good reading quotes then look no further. We’ve curated over 100 of the best quotes about reading here and categorised them as follows:
- Our top ten quotes about reading
- Quotes about the power of reading
- Authors’ quotes about reading books
- Inspirational quotes about reading books
- Quotes about reading from children’s literature
- Quotes about learning to read
Top ten best reading quotes
- “Show me a family of readers, and I will show you the people who move the world.” – Napoléon Bonaparte
- “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 Gillilan
- “Today a reader, tomorrow a leader.” – Margaret Fuller“
- Books are a uniquely portable magic.” – Stephen King
- “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
- “There is more treasure in books than in all the pirate’s loot on Treasure Island.” – Walt Disney
- “I find television very educating. Every time somebody turns on the set, I go into the other room and read a book.” – – Groucho Marx
- “So Matilda’s strong young mind continued to grow, nurtured by the voices of all those authors who had sent their books out into the world like ships on the sea. These books gave Matilda a hopeful and comforting message: You are not alone.” – Roald Dahl (Matilda)
- “To learn to read is to light a fire; every syllable that is spelled out is a spark.” – Victor Hugo
- “Oh, magic hour, when a child first knows she can read printed words!” – Betty Smith
Quotes about the power of reading
“You don’t have to burn books to destroy a culture. Just get people to stop reading them.” – Ray Bradbury
- “A reader lives a thousand lives before he dies. The [person] who never reads lives only one.” – George R. R. Martin
- “Show me a family of readers, and I will show you the people who move the world.” – Napoléon Bonaparte
- “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 Gillilan
- “Today a reader, tomorrow a leader.” – Margaret Fuller
- “Reading is essential for those who seek to rise above the ordinary.” – Jim Rohn
- “He that loves reading has everything within his reach.” -William Godwin
- “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
- “Reading is an exercise in empathy; an exercise in walking in someone else’s shoes for a while.” – Malorie Blackman
- “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
- “You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read.” – James Baldwin
- “When the Day of Judgment dawns and people, great and small, come marching in to receive their heavenly rewards, the Almighty will gaze upon the mere bookworms and say to Peter, Look, these need no reward. We have nothing to give them. They have loved reading.” – Virginia Woolf
- “Until I feared I would lose it, I never loved to read. One does not love breathing.” – Harper Lee
- “I read a book one day and my whole life was changed.” – Orhan Pamuk
- “People say that life is the thing, but I prefer reading.” – Logan Pearsall Smith
- “Once you have read a book you care about, some part of it is always with you.” – Louis L’Amour
- “Reading brings us unknown friends” – Honoré de Balzac
- “That’s the thing about books. They let you travel without moving your feet.” – Jhumpa Lahiri
- “The world was hers for the reading.” – Betty Smith
- “I have always imagined that paradise will be a kind of library.” – Jorge Luis Borges
- “Reading is a discount ticket to everywhere.” – Mary Schmich
- “No entertainment is so cheap as reading, nor any pleasure so lasting.” – Mary Wortley Montagu
- “If you are going to get anywhere in life you have to read a lot of books.” – Roald Dahl
- “That perfect tranquillity of life, which is nowhere to be found but in retreat, a faithful friend and a good library.” – Aphra Behn
- “To acquire the habit of reading is to construct for yourself a refuge from almost all the miseries of life.” – W. Somerset Maugham
- “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
- “If you don’t like to read, you haven’t found the right book.” – J.K. Rowling
- “Libraries will get you through times of no money better than money will get you through times of no libraries.” – Anne Herbert
- “What better occupation, really, than to spend the evening at the fireside with a book, with the wind beating on the windows and the lamp burning bright.” – Gustave Flaubert
- “I’m old-fashioned and think that reading books is the most glorious pastime that humankind has yet devised.” – Wisława Szymborska
- “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
- “Outside of a dog, a book is a man’s best friend. Inside of a dog, it’s too dark to read.” – Groucho Marx
- “Think before you speak. Read before you think.” – Fran Lebowitz
- “I took a speed-reading course and read War and Peace in twenty minutes. It involves Russia.” – Woody Allen
- “There are worse crimes than burning books. One of them is not reading them.” – Joseph Brodsky
- “I declare after all there is no enjoyment like reading! How much sooner one tires of anything 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 break the shackles of time – proof that humans can work magic.” – Carl Sagan
- “Employ your time in improving yourself by other men’s writings so that you shall come easily by what others have labored hard for.” – Socrates
- “Reading for me, is spending time with a friend.” – Gary Paulsen
- “From the reading of ‘good books’ there comes a richness of life that can be obtained in no other way.” – Gordon B. Hinckley
- “Reading is a basic tool in the living of a good life.” – Mortimer J. Adler
Authors’ quotes about reading books
“Books are a uniquely portable magic.” – Stephen King
- “Books are lighthouses erected in the great sea of time.” – E.P. Whipple
- “Books are the plane, the train, and the road. They are the destination, and the journey. They are home.” – Anna Quindlen
- “Picking five favorite books is like picking the five body parts you’d most like not to lose.” – Neil Gaiman
- “There is no friend as loyal as a book.” – Ernest Hemingway
- “A house without books is like a room without windows.” – Horace Mann
- “A parent or a teacher has only his lifetime; a good book can teach forever.” – Louis L’Amour
- “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
- “Be awesome! Be a book nut!” – Dr. Seuss
- “Good friends, good books and a sleepy conscience: this is the ideal life.” – Mark Twain
- “Books to the ceiling, Books to the sky, My pile of books is a mile high. How I love them! How I need them! I’ll have a long beard by the time I read them.” – Arnold Lobel
- “I cannot remember the books I’ve read any more than the meals I have eaten; even so, they have made me.” – Ralph Waldo Emerson
- “You can never get a cup of tea large enough or a book long enough to suit me.” – C.S. Lewis
- “Books smell good. They look good. You can press it to your bosom. You can carry it in your pocket.” – Ray Bradbury
- “Read the best books first, or you may not have a chance to read them at all.” – Henry David Thoreau
- “If there’s a book that you want to read, but it hasn’t been written yet, then you must write it.” – Toni Morrison
- “Many people, myself among them, feel better at the mere sight of a book.” – Jane Smiley
- “I kept always two books in my pocket, one to read, one to write in.” – Robert Louis Stevenson
- “Reading one book is like eating one potato chip.” – Diane Duane
- “Some books leave us free and some books make us free.” – Ralph Waldo Emerson
- “A good book is an event in my life.” – Stendhal
- “The man who does not read good books is no better than the man who can’t.” – Mark Twain
- “A book is a gift you can open again and again.” – Garrison Keillor
- “I guess there are never enough books.” – John Steinbeck
- “Fill your house with stacks of books, in all the crannies and all the nooks.” – Dr. Seuss
- “A classic is a book that has never finished saying what it has to say.” – Italo Calvino
- “Of course anyone who truly loves books buys more of them than he or she can hope to read in one fleeting lifetime. A good book, resting unopened in its slot on a shelf, full of majestic potentiality, is the most comforting sort of intellectual wallpaper.” – David Quammen
- “A children’s story that can only be enjoyed by children is not a good children’s story in the slightest.” – C.S. Lewis
- “It is a great thing to start life with a small number of really good books which are your very own.” – Arthur Conan Doyle
- “I intend to put up with nothing that I can put down.” – Edgar Allan Poe
Inspirational quotes about reading books
“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
- “I find television very educating. Every time somebody turns on the set, I go into the other room and read a book.” – – Groucho Marx
- “There is more treasure in books than in all the pirate’s loot on Treasure Island.” – Walt Disney
- “The reading of all good books is like conversation with the finest (people) of the past centuries.” – Descartes
- “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
- “The content of a book holds the power of education, and it is with this power that we can shape our future and change lives.” -Malala Yousafzai
- “Books serve to show a man that those original thoughts of his aren’t very new after all.” – Abraham Lincoln
- “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
- “A room without books is like a body without a soul.” – Cicero
- “Wear the old coat and buy the new book.” – Austin Phelps
Quotes about reading from children’s literature
“Stories are the most important thing in the world. Without stories, we wouldn’t be human beings at all.” – Philip Pullman (The Book Dust)
- “So Matilda’s strong young mind continued to grow, nurtured by the voices of all those authors who had sent their books out into the world like ships on the sea. These books gave Matilda a hopeful and comforting message: You are not alone.” – Roald Dahl (Matilda)
- “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 (Charlie and the Chocolate Factory)
- “Some books are so familiar that reading them is like being home again.” – Louisa May Alcott (Little Women)
- “A book, too, can be a star, ‘explosive material, capable of stirring up fresh life endlessly,’ a living fire to lighten the darkness, leading out into the expanding universe.” – Madeleine L’Engle (A Wrinkle in Time)
- “The more that you read, the more things you will know. The more that you learn, the more places you’ll go.” – Dr Seuss ( I Can Read With My Eyes Shut!)
- “Never trust anyone who has not brought a book with them.” – Lemony Snicket (A Series of Unfortunate Events)
Quotes about learning to read
“To learn to read is to light a fire; every syllable that is spelled out is a spark.” – Victor Hugo
- “Oh, magic hour, when a child first knows she can read printed words!” – Betty Smith
- “Once you learn to read, you will be forever free.” – Frederick Douglass
- “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
- “Books were my pass to personal freedom. I learned to read at age three, and there was discovered a whole world to conquer that went beyond our farm in Mississippi.” – Oprah Winfrey
- “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 are many little ways to enlarge your child’s world. Love of books is the best of all.” – Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis
- “Comics are a gateway drug to literacy.” – Art Spiegelman
- “Literacy is a bridge from misery to hope.” – Kofi Annan
- “The person who deserves most pity is a lonesome one on a rainy day who doesn’t know how to read.” – Benjamin Franklin
- “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
- “One of the greatest gifts adults can give -to their offspring and to their society- is to read to children.” – Carl Sagan
- “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
- “Children are made readers on the laps of their parents.” – Emilie Buchwald
- “Reading should not be presented to children as a chore, a duty. It should be offered as a gift.” – Kate DiCamillo
- “You’re never too old, too wacky, too wild to pick up a book and read to a child.” – Anita Merina
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Liz Hurley has 30+ years of high school teaching experience and is one of our senior writers here at Learnopoly.