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100 Quotes on Book Reading to Make You Read More

Reading a book can evoke several outcomes for different people. Some people read as an escape from reality, some to live as the characters, and for others, it’s to pass time. For many others, reading is a way to learn. Whatever the reason, reading a book can give you immense pleasure. 

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If you are a book lover, you can easily relate to these quotes on reading that we have collected. But if you’re not, do not be deterred. After reading these quotes, you might find yourself holding a book! 

100 Quotes on Reading

“Today a reader, tomorrow a leader.”

Margaret Fuller 

“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

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

Jhumpa Lahiri

“I have always imagined that Paradise will be a kind of library.”  

Jorge Luis Borges

“Never put off till tomorrow the book you can read today.”  

Holbrook Jackson

“I guess there are never enough books.”  

John Steinbeck

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

Dr. Seuss

“Some of these things are true and some of them lies. But they are all good stories.”  

Hilary Mantel

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

Napoleon Bonaparte

“Libraries will get you through times of no money better than money will get you through times of no libraries.”  

Anne Herbert

“You can get lost in any library, no matter the size. But the more lost you are, the more things you’ll find.”  

Millie Florence

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

Walt Disney

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

C.S. Lewis

“We read to know we are not alone.”

C.S. Lewis

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

Charles Baudelaire

“I love the sound of the pages flicking against my fingers. Print against fingerprints. Books make people quiet, yet they are so loud.”  

Nnedi Okorafor

“A book is a version of the world. If you do not like it, ignore it; or offer your own version in return.”  

Salman Rushdie

“The whole world opened to me when I learned to read.”  

Mary McLeod Bethune

“I love the smell of book ink in the morning.”

Umberto Eco

“There is no frigate like a book to take us lands away.”  

Emily Dickinson

“Rainy days should be spent at home with a cup of tea and a good book.”  

Bill Patterson

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

Emma Thompson

“If there is a book that you want to read, but it hasn’t been written yet, you must be the one to write it.”  

Toni Morrison

“A good would take me out of myself and then stuff me back in, outsized, now, and uneasy with the fit.”  

David Sedaris

“Wear the old coat and buy the new book.”  

Austin Phelps

“Reading brings us unknown friends.”  

Honoré de Balzac

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

Kate DiCamillo

“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

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

Emma Thompson

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

Francois Mauriac

“Take a good book to bed with you – books do not snore.” 

Thea Dorn

“Books are a uniquely portable magic.”  

Stephen King

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

George Orwell

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

Malorie Blackman

“A well-read woman is a dangerous creature.”  

Lisa Kleypas

“I believe there is power in words, power in asserting our existence, our experience, our lives, through words.”  

Jesmyn Ward

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

Carlos Ruiz Zafón

“It is a good rule after reading a new book, never to allow yourself another new one till you have read an old one in between.”  

C.S. Lewis

“Think before you speak. Read before you think.”  

Fran Lebowitz

“A half-read book is a half-finished love affair.”  

David Mitchell

“I owe everything I am and everything I will ever be to books.”  

Gary Paulsen

“It is is better to know one book intimately than a hundred superficially.”  

Donna Tartt

“Books don’t offer real escape, but they can stop a mind scratching itself raw.”  

David Mitchell

“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

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

Harper Lee

“No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader. No surprise in the writer, no surprise in the reader.”  

Robert Frost

“Reading is a discount ticket to everywhere.”  

Mary Schmich

“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

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

Lena Dunham

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

Henry David Thoreau

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

Groucho Marx

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

J.K. Rowling

“If you don’t have time to read, you don’t have the time (or the tools) to write. Simple as that.”  

Stephen King

“Reading is to the mind what exercise is to the body.”  

Joseph Addison

“Once you learn to read, you will be forever free.”  

Frederick Douglass

“Books may well be the only true magic.”  

Alice Hoffman

“Once I began to read, I began to exist. I am what I read.”  

Walter Dean Myers

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

William Styron

“Books are not made for furniture, but there is nothing else that so beautifully furnishes a house.”  

Henry Ward Beecher

“The world belongs to those who read.”  

Rick Holland

“Ah, how good it is to be among people who are reading.”  

Rainer Maria Rilke

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

Abraham Lincoln

“A book is a gift you can open again and again.”  

Garrison Keillor

Writing comes from reading, and reading is the finest teacher of how to write.”   

Annie Proulx

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

Khaled Hosseini

“Reading is an intelligent way of not having to think.” 

Walter Moers

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

Mary Wortley Montagu

“Books were my pass to personal freedom.”  

Oprah Winfrey

“Reading—even browsing—an old book can yield sustenance denied by a database search.” 

James Gleick

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

Sharon Creech

“A peasant that reads is a prince in waiting.” 

Walter Mosley

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

Betty Smith

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

Benedict Cumberbatch

“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 problem with books is that they end.”  

Caroline Kepnes

“Read a thousand books, and your words will flow like a river.”  

Lisa See

“A good book is an event in my life.” 

Stendhal

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

George Bernard Shaw

Sleep is good, he said, and books are better.”  

George R.R. Martin

“When I have a little money, I buy books; and if I have any left, I buy food and clothes.”  

Erasmus

“Some books leave us free and some books make us free.”  

Ralph Waldo Emerson

“We tell ourselves stories in order to live.” 

Joan Didion

“Books and doors are the same things. You open them, and you go through into another world.”  

Jeanette Winterson

“When I look back, I am so impressed again with the life-giving power of literature.”   

Maya Angelou

“We read in bed because reading is halfway between life and dreaming, our own consciousness in someone else’s mind.”  

Anna Quindlen

“To know a man’s library is, in some measure, to know a man’s mind.”  

Geraldine Brooks

“If you only read the books that everyone else is reading, you can only think what everyone else is thinking.”  

Haruki Murakami

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

George R.R. Martin

“No. I can survive well enough on my own – if given the proper reading material.”  

Sarah J. Maas

“You see, unlike in the movies, there is no THE END sign flashing at the end of books. When I’ve read a book, I don’t feel like I’ve finished anything. So I start a new one.”   

Elif Shafak

“When you lose yourself in a book the hours grow wings and fly.” 

Chloe Thurlow

“Reality doesn’t always give us the life that we desire, but we can always find what we desire between the pages of books.”  

Adelise M. Cullens

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

Jean Rhys

“The unread story is not a story; it is little black marks on wood pulp. The reader, reading it, makes it live: a live thing, a story.”  

Ursula K. LeGuin

“Read. Read. Read. Just don’t read one type of book. Read different books by various authors so that you develop different styles.”  

R.L. Stine

“Books were safer than other people anyway.”  

Neil Gaiman

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

Rene Descartes

“A room without books is like a body without a soul.” 

Cicero

 “Not all readers are leaders, but all leaders are readers.”  

President Harry Truman

Wrapping up 

Reading is more than a pastime – it can enrich your life, open up worlds for you, and be the key to opportunities that you hadn’t even dreamed of. Most successful people read because it’s only by reading that we can tap into the greatest minds that ever lived. And in that way, we can live a thousand times.

Affiliate Disclosures
Dani Rhys
Dani Rhys

Dani Rhys has worked as a writer and editor for over 15 years. She holds a Masters degree in Linguistics and Education, and has also studied Political Science, Ancient History and Literature. She has a wide range of interests ranging from ancient cultures and mythology to Harry Potter and gardening. She works as the chief editor of Symbol Sage but also takes the time to write on topics that interest her.