Bookroo has compiled a list of the 100 best quotes about reading. They are insightful, witty, and motivating things that have been said about reading by authors, poets, scientists, artists, visionaries, and comedians. Let us know which is your favorite, and what quotes you would add to the list.
Readers live a thousand lives before they die
“Reading is essential for those who seek to rise above the ordinary.”
- Jim Rohn
- “You don’t have to burn books to destroy a culture. Just get people to stop reading them.”
- Ray Bradbury
- The more you read, the more things you learn and the more places you will go.”
- Dr. Seuss
- Reading is an exercise in empathy and a walk in someone else’s shoes.
A room without books is like a body without a soul
“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 “I can’t imagine a man really enjoying a book and reading it only once.”
- C.S. Lewis “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 “Some books leave us free and some books make us free.”
- Ralph Waldo Emerson
- Once you learn to read, you will be forever free
“For my whole life, my favorite activity was reading. It’s not the most social pastime.”
Audrey Hepburn
- “Reading for me, is spending time with a friend.”
- Gary Paulsen
- “[F]rom the reading of ‘good books’ there comes a richness of life that can be obtained in no other way.”
- Gordon B. Hinckley
Famous quotes about reading
“A book is a gift you can open again and again.”
- Garrison Keillor.
- “If you are going to get anywhere in life you have to read a lot of books.”
- Roald Dahl.
- 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.
“I’m old-fashioned and think that reading books is the most glorious pastime humankind has yet devised.”
Never put off till tomorrow the book you can read today. You’re never too old, too wacky, or too wild to pick up a book and read to a child.”
- Anita Merina
- “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, on a shelf, full of majestic potentiality, is a comforting sort of intellectual wallpaper.”
- David Quammen
Books and Literature
Despite the enormous quantity of books, how few people read
- Voltaire
- JK. Rowling
- “If you don’t like to read, you haven’t found the right book.”
- Anne Herbert
- Rainer Maria Rilke
- Children are made readers on the laps of their parents
- Outside of a dog, a book is a man’s best friend
- Groucho Marx
- Albert Einstein
- Patrick Rothfuss
“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
- “I declare after all there is no enjoyment like reading! How much sooner one tires of any thing than of a book!”
- Jane Austen
