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160 Quotes About Books & Reading

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Many of us have special memories of the books that have inspired us, and have learned the profound effect that reading the right book can have at the right moment. If you’re short on time, reading some quotes about books is the next best thing.

Books have the power to transport us to new worlds and different times , but they can also take us back to the important moments in our own lives.

From building your vocabulary to reducing stress, preventing age-related cognitive decline and increasing your ability to empathize, reading books is an easy way to look after your mind and body.

Whether you’re an avid reader or wish you read more, we hope you enjoy these quotes about books and reading!

Page Contents

Quotes About Books

′Classic′ – a book which people praise and don’t read. Mark Twain

Sleep is good, he said, and books are better. George R.R. Martin

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

Many people, myself among them, feel better at the mere sight of a book. Jane Smiley, Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Novel

The library is inhabited by spirits that come out of the pages at night. Isabel Allende

If you don’t like to read, you haven’t found the right book. J.K. Rowling

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

Fill your house with stacks of books, in all the crannies and all the nooks. Dr. Seuss

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

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

I love the smell of book ink in the morning. Umberto Eco

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

It is is better to know one book intimately than a hundred superficially. Donna Tartt, The Secret History

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

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

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

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

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

The America I love still exists at the front desks of our public libraries. Kurt Vonnegut

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

I love books. I adore everything about them. I love the feel of the pages on my fingertips. They are light enough to carry, yet so heavy with worlds and ideas. 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

Books were my pass to personal freedom. Oprah Winfrey

No man can be called friendless who has God and the companionship of good books. Elizabeth Barrett Browning

A half-read book is a half-finished love affair. David Mitchell

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

Some of these things are true and some of them lies. But they are all good stories. Hilary Mantel, Wolf Hall

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

Wear the old coat and buy the new book. Austin Phelps

The best books… are those that tell you what you know already. George Orwell, 1984

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

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 Fault in Our Stars

Reading one book is like eating one potato chip. Diane Duane

For some of us, books are as important as almost anything else on earth. What a miracle it is that out of these small, flat, rigid squares of paper unfolds world after world after world, worlds that sing to you, comfort and quiet or excite you. Books help us understand who we are and how we are to behave. They show us what community and friendship mean; they show us how to live and die. Anne Lamott

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

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

Books are not made for furniture, but there is nothing else that so beautifully furnishes a house. Henry Ward Beecher

I guess there are never enough books. John Steinbeck

Libraries will get you through times of no money better than money will get you through times of no libraries. Anne Herbert

Children know perfectly well that unicorns aren’t real, but they also know that books about unicorns, if they are good books, are true books. Ursula K. LeGuin

A good bookshop is just a genteel Black Hole that knows how to read. Terry Pratchett

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

What a blessing it is to love books as I love them;- to be able to converse with the dead, and to live amidst the unreal! Thomas Babington Macaulay

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

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 owe everything I am and everything I will ever be to books. Gary Paulsen

Happiness. That’s what books smells like. Happiness. That’s why I always wanted to have a book shop. What better life than to trade in happiness? Saran MacLean

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

Quotes About Reading

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

Reading brings us unknown friends. Honore de Belzac

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

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

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

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

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

Read the best books first, or you may not have a chance to read them at all. Henry David Thoreau

Reading is to the mind what exercise is to the body. Joseph Addison

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

Let others pride themselves about how many pages they have written; I’d rather boast about the ones I’ve read. Jorge Luis Borges

No entertainment is so cheap as reading, nor any pleasure so lasting. Mary Wortley Montagu

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

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

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—the best state yet to keep absolute loneliness at bay. William Styron

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

If you only read the books that everyone else is reading, you can only think what everyone else is thinking. Haruki Murakami, Norwegian Wood

Reading is an act of civilization; it’s one of the greatest acts of civilization because it takes the free raw material of the mind and builds castles of possibilities. Ben Okri

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

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

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

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

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

I am reading six books at once, the only way of reading; since, as you will agree, one book is only a single unaccompanied note, and to get the full sound, one needs ten others at the same time. Virginia Woolf

Reading means borrowing. Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

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

Read. Read. Read. Just don’t read one type of book. Read different books by various authors so that you develop different style. R.L. Stine

Ah, how good it is to be among people who are reading. Rainer Maria Rilke

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, The History Boys

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

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

The world was hers for the reading. Betty Smith

Let us read, and let us dance; these two amusements will never do any harm to the world. Voltaire

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

No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader. No surprise in the writer, no surprise in the reader. Robert Frost

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

A peasant that reads is a prince in waiting. Walter Mosley

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 word after a word after a word is power. Margaret Atwood

Only a generation of readers will spawn a generation of writers. Steven Spielberg

She read books as one would breathe air, to fill up and live. Annie Dillard

Reading furnishes the mind only with materials of knowledge; it is thinking that makes what we read ours. John Locke

Read, read, read. Read everything — trash, classics, good and bad, and see how they do it. Just like a carpenter who works as an apprentice and studies the master. Read! You’ll absorb it. Then write. If it’s good, you’ll find out. If it’s not, throw it out of the window. William Faulkner

Once you have read a book you care about, some part of it is always with you. Louis L’Amour

Reading was a joy, a desperately needed escape — I didn’t read to learn, I was reading to read. Christian Bauman

Reading is departure and arrival. Terri Guillemets

“Not all readers are leaders, but all leaders are readers.” President Harry Truman

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

Always read something that will make you look good if you die in the middle of it. P.J. O’Rourke

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

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

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

Leaders are always readers. Kevin Trudeau

Ready for more reading? Check out our list of 8 Books for Graduate Students and flip some great pages today.

The Best Literary Quotes

Books are everywhere; and always the same sense of adventure fills us. Second-hand books are wild books, homeless books; they have come together in vast flocks of variegated feather, and have a charm which the domesticated volumes of the library lack. Virginia Woolf, Street Haunting

Never put off till tomorrow the book you can read today. Holbrook Jackson

Man reading should be man intensely alive. The book should be a ball of light in one’s hand. Ezra Pound

I couldn’t live a week without a private library – indeed, I’d part with all my furniture and squat and sleep on the floor before I’d let go of the 1500 or so books I possess. H.P. Lovecraft

Think of this – that the writer wrote alone, and the reader read alone, and they were alone with each other. A.S. Byatt, Possession

If you stop to think about it, you’ll have to admit that all the stories in the world consist essentially of twenty-six letters. The letters are always the same, only the arrangement varies. From letters words are formed, from words sentences, from sentences chapters, and from chapters stories. Michael Ende

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

If one cannot enjoy reading a book over and over again, there is no use in reading it at all. Oscar Wilde

In the end, we’ll all become stories. Margaret Atwood

Reading is my favorite occupation, when I have leisure for it and books to read. Anne Brontë

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

I declare after all there is no enjoyment like reading! How much sooner one tires of any thing 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, Pride and Prejudice

I still love books. Nothing a computer can do can compare to a book. You can’t really put a book on the Internet. Ray Bradbury, Farenheit 451

Do not read, as children do, to amuse yourself, or like the ambitious, for the purpose of instruction. No, read in order to live. Gustave Flaubert

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

Only the very weak-minded refuse to be influenced by literature and poetry. Cassandra Clare

Finally, from so little sleeping and so much reading, his brain dried up and he went completely out of his mind. Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, Don Quixote

What really knocks me out is a book that, when you’re all done reading it, you wish the author that wrote it was a terrific friend of yours and you could call him up on the phone whenever you felt like it. That doesn’t happen much, though. J.D. Salinger

A reader lives a thousand lives before he dies… the man who never reads lives only one. George R.R. Martin

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, Journey to the Center of the Earth

I kept always two books in my pocket, one to read, one to write in. Robert Louis Stevenson

Books don’t offer real escape, but they can stop a mind scratching itself raw. David Mitchell, Cloud Atlas

A good library will never be too neat, or too dusty, because somebody will always be in it, taking books off the shelves and staying up late reading them. Lemony Snicket, Horseradish

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

Isn’t it odd how much fatter a book gets when you’ve read it several times?” Mo had said…”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 a pressed flower…both strange and familiar. Cornelia Funke, Inkspell

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, Keeping a Rendezvous

I think we ought to read only the kind of books that wound or stab us. If the book we’re reading doesn’t wake us up with a blow to the head, what are we reading for? So that it will make us happy, as you write? Good Lord, we would be happy precisely if we had no books, and the kind of books that make us happy are the kind we could write ourselves if we had to. But we need books that affect us like a disaster, that grieve us deeply, like the death of someone we loved more than ourselves, like being banished into forests far from everyone, like a suicide. A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us. That is my belief. Franz Kafka

We hope you’ve loved these quotes about books and reading.

It’s never too late (or early) to expand your horizons and start reading, and reading books is even good for your physical and mental health . So star turning those pages and getting inspired through reading today.

Natalie Seale

3 thoughts on “160 Quotes About Books & Reading”

Thank you for all of these book quotes. I like to write them in my book journal and reread them often.

Thanks so much, for this wonderful book quotes.

My favorite quote is “When I have a little money, I buy books; and if I have any left, I buy food and clothes.”– Erasmus

Thank you for this very interesting collection of thought-provoking quotes. If felt good to agree and disagree with them all – with none leaving me untouched.

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80 Inspiring Quotes About Books and Reading

Books are important for the mind, heart, and soul. But don't take it from us: These quotes about reading speak for themselves.

By Stefanie Hargreaves

The power to be found between the pages of a book is formidable, indeed. And these 80 inspiring quotes about books and importance of reading are here to remind you of that. From beloved bestsellers to iconic celebrities, these quotes exemplify the benefits of reading and of a good books to comfort, challenge, and inspire you. For, as author Anna Quindlen says, "Books are the plane, and the train, and the road. They are the destination, and the journey. They are home."

"Today a reader, tomorrow a leader." – Margaret Fuller

"A word after a word after a word is power." – Margaret Atwood

"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

"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

"Books are a uniquely portable magic." – Stephen King, On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft

"Books are mirrors: You only see in them what you already have inside you." – Carlos Ruiz Zafón, The Shadow of the Wind

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. 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, Bird by Bird

"We tell ourselves stories in order to live." – Joan Didion, The White Album

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

"A good would 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. 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, The Polysyllabic Spree

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

"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, I'll Ask You Three Times, Are You OK?: Tales of Driving and Being Driven

"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

"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, Meditations from a Movable Chair

"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, 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

"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." – Rene Descartes

"That’s the thing about books. They let you travel without moving your feet." – Jhumpa Lahiri, The Namesake

"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, 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

"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. 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, Bad Feminist

"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

"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, Magic Lessons

"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 Reading Diary: A Passionate Reader's Reflections on a Year of Books

"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, The Books in My Life

"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, The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making

"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, Books And You

"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, Little Women

"A reader lives a thousand lives before he dies... The man who never reads lives only one." – George R.R. Martin, A Dance with Dragons

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

"The best books... are those that tell you what you know already." – George Orwell, 1984

"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, The Brooklyn Follies

"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, The Marriage Plot

"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 Fault in Our Stars

"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, The History Boys

"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, Clockwork Angel

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

"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 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, Fahrenheit 451

"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, The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Society

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100 Most Famous Book Quotes of All Time

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Have you ever encountered a quote that pierced your heart, made you laugh uncontrollably, brought a huge smile to your face, or made you bawl your eyes out?

I’m sure many of you have come across such quotes, and being readers, it’s an everyday thing for us, right? Well, it’s definitely for me! 

Certain phrases in a book hold the power to make us feel a plethora of emotions, and they stick with us even after the book is placed in our ‘finished reading section.’ 

Book quotes are worth writing and remembering, and if you connect with them, then they will be with you forever. 

To help you with the collection, I have compiled this list of 100 famous book quotes from some of the world’s most beloved authors and their best-known books. 

With the combination of classics and modern-day books , this list consists of quotes that have struck a chord in the hearts of millions around the world.

It is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye. _ Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, The Little Prince

I am no bird; and no net ensnares me: I am a free human being with an independent will, which I now exert to leave you. _ Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre

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… _ Oh, the Places You’ll Go! Dr Seuss

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair. _ Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities

Forgiveness condones nothing, but it does cast off the chains of anger, judgment, resentment, denial, and pain that choke growth. In this way, it allows for life, for freedom. So that’s what’s at stake when it comes to forgiveness: freedom. With this freedom, we can feel better, be better, and choose better next time. _ Michele Harper, The Beauty in Breaking

Whenever you feel like criticizing anyone … just remember that all the people in this world haven’t had the advantages that you’ve had. _ The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald

Whatever our souls are made of, his and mine are the same. _ Wuthering Heights, Emily Bronte

A man, after he has brushed off the dust and chips of his life, will have left only the hard, clean questions: Was it good or was it evil? Have I done well — or ill? _ John Steinbeck, East of Eden

This above all: To thine own self be true, And it must follow, as the night the day, Thou canst not then be false to any man. _ William Shakespeare, Hamlet

‘Why did you do all this for me?’ he asked. ‘I don’t deserve it. I’ve never done anything for you.’ ‘You have been my friend,’ replied Charlotte. ‘That in itself is a tremendous thing.’ _ E.B. White, Charlotte’s Web

I wanted you to see what real courage is, instead of getting the idea that courage is a man with a gun in his hand. It’s when you know you’re licked before you begin but you begin anyway and you see it through no matter what. You rarely win, but sometimes you do. _ Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird

The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which. _ George Orwell, Animal Farm

How you live your life is your business. But remember, our hearts and our bodies are given to us only once. Most of us can’t help but live as though we’ve got two lives to live, one is the mockup, the other the finished version, and then there are all those versions in between. _ André Aciman, Call Me By Your Name

And so we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past. _ F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby

Generally, by the time you are Real, most of your hair has been loved off, and your eyes drop out and you get loose in the joints and very shabby. But these things don’t matter at all, because once you are Real you can’t be ugly, except to people who don’t understand. _ Margery Williams, Velveteen Rabbit

There are years that ask questions and years that answer. _ Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God

Memories warm you up from the inside. But they also tear you apart. _ Haruki Murakami, Kafka on the Shore

Ever’body’s askin’ that. ‘What we comin’ to?’ Seems to me we don’t never come to nothin’. Always on the way. _ John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath

Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past. _ George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four

It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife. _ Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice

Tomorrow I’ll think of some way to get him back. After all, tomorrow is another day. _ Margaret Mitchell, Gone with the Wind

Why, sometimes, I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast. _ Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking-Glass

Life is to be lived, not controlled; and humanity is won by continuing to play in face of certain defeat. _ Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man

Don’t ever tell anybody anything. If you do, you start missing everybody. _ J. D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye

I had the epiphany that laughter was light, and light was laughter, and that this was the secret of the universe. _ Donna Tartt, The Goldfinch

The world breaks everyone, and afterward, many are strong at the broken places. _ Ernest Hemingway, A Farewell to Arms

From that time on, the world was hers for the reading. She would never be lonely again, never miss the lack of intimate friends. Books became her friends and there was one for every mood. _ Betty Smith, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn

Once upon a time there was a boy who loved a girl, and her laughter was a question he wanted to spend his whole life answering. _ Nicole Krauss, The History of Love

Very few castaways can claim to have survived so long at sea as Mr. Patel, and none in the company of an adult Bengal tiger. _ Yann Martel, Life of Pi

You pierce my soul. I am half agony. Half hope. Tell me not that I am too late, that such precious feelings are gone for ever. _ Jane Austen, Persuasion

You forget what you want to remember, and you remember what you want to forget. _ Cormac McCarthy, The Road

Call me Ishmael. _ Herman Melville, Moby Dick

He has put a knife on the things that held us together and we have fallen apart. _ Chinua Achebe, Things Fall Apart

Nowadays people know the price of everything and the value of nothing. _ Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Grey

Time is the longest distance between two places. _ Tennessee Williams, The Glass Menagerie

The voice of the sea is seductive, never ceasing, whispering, clamoring, murmuring, inviting the soul to wander in abysses of solitude. _ Kate Chopin, The Awakening

We dream in our waking moments, and walk in our sleep. _ Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter

But soft! What light through yonder window breaks? It is the east, and Juliet is the sun. _ William Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet

Memories, even your most precious ones, fade surprisingly quickly. But I don’t go along with that. The memories I value most, I don’t ever see them fading. _ Kazuo Ishiguro, Never Let Me Go

My advice is, never do tomorrow what you can do today. Procrastination is the thief of time. _ Charles Dickens, David Copperfield

So many things are possible just as long as you don’t know they’re impossible. _ Norton Juster, The Phantom Tollbooth

I can’t stand it to think my life is going so fast and I’m not really living it. _ Ernest Hemingway, The Sun Also Rises

The same substance composes us — the tree overhead, the stone beneath us, the bird, the beast, the star — we are all one, all moving to the same end. _ P.L. Travers, Mary Poppins

Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield. _ Ulysses, Alfred Lord Tennyson

I wish, as well as everybody else, to be perfectly happy; but, like everybody else, it must be in my own way. _ Jane Austen, Sense and Sensibility

Love is holy because it is like grace – the worthiness of its object is never really what matters. _ Marilynne Robinson, Gilead

Brave doesn’t mean you’re not scared. It means you go on even though you’re scared. _ Angie Thomas, The Hate U Give

And, when you want something, all the universe conspires in helping you to achieve it. _ Paulo Coelho, The Alchemist

It doesn’t matter who you are or what you look like, so long as somebody loves you. _ Roald Dahl, The Witches

Life, with its rules, its obligations, and its freedoms, is like a sonnet: You’re given the form, but you have to write the sonnet yourself. _ Madeleine L’Engle, A Wrinkle in Time

The answer to the ultimate question of life, the universe and everything is 42. _ Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy

All the world’s a stage, and all the men and women merely players. They have their exits and their entrances; And one man in his time plays many parts. _ William Shakespeare, As You Like It

Stay gold, Ponyboy, stay gold. _ S. E. Hinton, The Outsiders

Sometimes I can hear my bones straining under the weight of all the lives I’m not living. _ Jonathan Safran Foer, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close

Not all those who wander are lost. _ The Lord of the Rings, J.R.R. Tolkein

Do I love you? My God, if your love were a grain of sand, mine would be a universe of beaches. _ William Goldman, The Princess Bride

You don’t know about me without you have read a book by the name of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, but that ain’t no matter. _ Mark Twain, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

Love is the longing for the half of ourselves we have lost. _ Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being

It is our choices, Harry, that show what we truly are, far more than our abilities. _ J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets

For you, a thousand times over. _ Khaled Hosseini, The Kite Runner

Then you must teach my daughter this same lesson. How to lose your innocence but not your hope. How to laugh forever. _ Amy Tan, The Joy Luck Club

And may the odds be ever in your favor. _ Suzanne Collins, The Hunger Games

Ralph wept for the end of innocence, the darkness of man’s heart, and the fall through the air of the true, wise friend called Piggy. _ William Golding, Lord of the Flies

Oh, the places you’ll go! You’ll be on your way up! You’ll be seeing great sights! You’ll join the high fliers who soar to high heights. _ Dr. Seuss, Oh, the Places You’ll Go

The longer I live, the more uninformed I feel. Only the young have an explanation for everything. _ Isabel Allende, City of the Beasts

We were the people who were not in the papers. We lived in the blank white spaces at the edges of print. It gave us more freedom. We lived in the gaps between the stories. _ Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale

We are such stuff as dreams are made on, and our little life is rounded with a sleep. _ William Shakespeare, The Tempest

As Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from uneasy dreams he found himself transformed in his bed into an enormous insect. _ Franz Kafka, The Metamorphosis

Most men and women will grow up to love their servitude and will never dream of revolution. _ Aldous Huxley, Brave New World Revisited

‘But man is not made for defeat,’ he said. ‘A man can be destroyed but not defeated.’ _ Ernest Hemingway, The Old Man and the Sea

There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you. _ Maya Angelou, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings

Anything worth dying for is certainly worth living for.” _ Joseph Heller, Catch-22

There is nothing like looking, if you want to find something. You certainly usually find something, if you look, but it is not always quite the something you were after. _ J.R.R. Tolkien, The Hobbit

Real courage is when you know you’re licked before you begin, but you begin anyway and see it through no matter what. _ To Kill a Mockingbird, Harper Lee

All we can know is that we know nothing. And that’s the height of human wisdom. _ Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace

“We accept the love we think we deserve.” _ Stephen Chbosky, The Perks of Being a Wallflower

“But it’s like trying to hold on to a fistful of sand: all the little bits slip out of your hands, and then you’re just clutching air and grit.” _ Jenny Han To All The Boys I’ve Loved Before

“Unexpressed emotions will never die. They are buried alive, and will come forth later, in uglier ways.” _ Alex Michaelides, The Silent Patient

“But the truth is, praise is just like an addiction. The more you get it, the more of it you need just to stay even.” _ The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo, Taylor Jenkins Reid

“Knowing too much of your future is never a good thing.” _ Rick Riordan, The Lightning Thief

“The heart is an arrow. It demands aim to land true.” _ Leigh Bardugo, Six of Crows

“Fear is a phoenix. You can watch it burn a thousand times and still it will return.” _ Leigh Bardugo, Crooked Kingdom

“There is no good and evil, there is only power and those too weak to seek it.” _ J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone

“God gives us the ugliness so we don’t take the beautiful things in life for granted.” _ Colleen Hoover, Ugly Love

“Some old wounds never truly heal, and bleed again at the slightest word.” _ George R.R. Martin, A Game of Thrones

“And that’s how easy it is for a writer to pretend to be someone they aren’t.” _ Colleen Hoover, Verity

“Nobody likes being alone that much. I don’t go out of my way to make friends, that’s all. It just leads to disappointment. ” _ Haruki Murakami, Norwegian Wood

“A lot of you cared, just not enough.” _ Jay Asher, Thirteen Reasons Why

“There’s a difference between really loving someone and loving the idea of her.” _ Gillian Flynn, Gone Girl

“Impulsive actions led to trouble, and trouble could have unpleasant consequences.” _ Stieg Larsson, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo

“He really had been through death, but he had returned because he could not bear the solitude.” _ Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude

“Like most misery, it started with apparent happiness.” _ Markus Zusak, The Book Thief

“Behind every trial and sorrow that He makes us shoulder, God has a reason.” _ Khaled Hosseini, A Thousand Splendid Suns

“Perhaps that’s why I find myself looking backward. The past has a clarity I can no longer see in the present.”  _ Kristin Hannah, The Nightingale

“It had always seemed to him a very plush kind of problem, a privilege, really, to consider whether life was meaningful or not.” _ Hanya Yanagihara, A Little Life

“She had never dreamed there could be so much pain in a life when there was nothing physically wrong. She hurt all the time. _ Stephen King, The Shining

“I am not afraid of storms, for I am learning how to sail my ship.” _ Louisa May Alcott, Little Women

“Kindred spirits are not so scarce as I used to think. It’s splendid to find out there are so many of them in the world. _ L.M. Montgomery, Anne of Green Gables

“Humans are so ill-equipped for peace.” _ V.E. Schwab, The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue

“People always clap for the wrong reasons.” _ J.D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye

There are so many incredible, famous book quotes out there; it’s hard to choose just a few! What are your favorite book quotes of all time? Let me know in the comments below!

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• 40 Wise and Inspiring Joan Didion Quotes
• 50 Fascinating Edgar Allan Poe Quotes
• 45 Inspiring Charles Dickens Quotes
• 40 Inspiring Nelson Mandela Quotes

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88 Best Quotes About Books & Reading

Books and reading are more than just hobbies — they’re gateways to other worlds, a form of travel while staying in place, and a catalyst for personal and social transformation.

They inspire our imaginations, broaden our horizons, and offer us perspectives we might never encounter otherwise. (And as Arthur taught us , having fun isn’t hard when you’ve got a library card .)

Books are tools for change . They’ve sparked revolutions, preserved cultures, and even helped topple oppressive regimes.

But beyond their societal impact, books also provide personal growth and comfort. From classic literature to modern non-fiction, every page holds the potential for new knowledge and insight. 

Prominent figures and authors have spoken on the impact reading has had on their lives, shaping them into the changemakers they are today.

In this article, we’ve gathered some of the most empowering quotes about books and reading. 

These quotes encapsulate the joy, the education, and the transformative power that comes with being lost in a good book. 

Whether you’re an avid reader seeking affirmation or someone looking to cultivate a reading habit, these quotes are sure to resonate with you and perhaps inspire you to open that book you’ve been meaning to read. 

Dive in and be reminded of the incredible value of a well-written word:

You might also like: Quotes About Banned Books | Good Good Good Book Recommendations | Book Holidays & Months Calendar

The Best Quotes About Books & Reading

Famous quotes.

“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

“Let us remember: One book, one pen, one child, and one teacher can change the world.” — Malala Yousafzai

“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, Pride and Prejudice

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

“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

“Books are a uniquely portable magic.” — Stephen King, On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft

“Lock up your libraries if you like; but there is no gate, no lock, no bolt that you can set upon the freedom of my mind.” — Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own

“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

“The magic is only in what books say, how they stitched the patches of the universe together into one garment for us.” — Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451

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

“If we encounter a man of rare intellect, we should ask him what books he reads.” — Ralph Waldo Emerson

Quotes About Books

“Great books help you understand, and they help you feel understood.” — John Green

“That’s the thing about books. They let you travel without moving your feet.” — Jhumpa Lahiri, The Namesake

“I can never read all the books I want; I can never be all the people I want and live all the lives I want. I can never train myself in all the skills I want. And why do I want? I want to live and feel all the shades, tones and variations of mental and physical experience possible in my life. And I am horribly limited.” — Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

“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 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 don’t offer real escape, but they can stop a mind scratching itself raw.” — David Mitchell, Cloud Atlas

“I am eternally grateful for my knack of finding in great books, some of them very funny books, reason enough to feel honored to be alive, no matter what else might be going on.” — Kurt Vonnegut, Timequake

“Books and doors are the same thing. You open them, and you go through into another world.” — Jeanette Winterson

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

“And most of all, books. They were, in and of themselves, reasons to stay alive. Every book written is the product of a human mind in a particular state. Add all the books together and you get the end sum of humanity. Every time I read a great book I felt I was reading a kind of map, a treasure map, and the treasure I was being directed to was in actual fact myself.” — Matt Haig , Reasons to Stay Alive

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

“Read the best books first, or you may not have a chance to read them at all.” — Henry David Thoreau, A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers

“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

Reading Quotes

“Read books. Care about things. Get excited. Try not to be too down on yourself. Enjoy the ever-present game of knowing.” — Hank Green

“I think reading is part of the birthright of the human being.” — LeVar Burton

“The ability to read awoke inside of me some long dormant craving to be mentally alive.” — Malcolm X, The Autobiography of Malcolm X

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

“You should never read just for ‘enjoyment.’ Read to make yourself smarter! Less judgmental. More apt to understand your friends’ insane behavior, or better yet, your own. Pick ‘hard books.’ Ones you have to concentrate on while reading. And for god’s sake, don’t let me ever hear you say, ‘I can’t read fiction. I only have time for the truth.’ Fiction is the truth, fool! Ever hear of ‘literature’? That means fiction, too, stupid.” — John Waters, Role Models

“We read books to find out who we are. What other people, real or imaginary, do and think and feel… is an essential guide to our understanding of what we ourselves are and may become.” — Ursula K. LeGuin

“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 Fault in Our Stars

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

“I am reading six books at once, the only way of reading; since, as you will agree, one book is only a single unaccompanied note, and to get the full sound, one needs ten others at the same time.” — Virginia Woolf, The Letters of Virginia Woolf: Volume Three, 1923-1928

“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 Reading Diary

“Read the books they don’t want you to. That’s where the good stuff is.” — LeVar Burton

Inspiring Quotes About Reading

“Once you have read a book you care about, some part of it is always with you.” — Louis L’Amour

“I read a book one day and my whole life was changed.” — Orhan Pamuk, The New Life

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

“Reading is like thinking, like praying, like talking to a friend, like expressing your ideas, like listening to other people’s ideas, like listening to music, like looking at the view, like taking a walk on the beach.” — Roberto Bolaño, 2666

“Reading well is one of the great pleasures that solitude can afford you.” — Harold Bloom

“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

“Reading a book is like re-writing it for yourself. You bring to a novel, anything you read, all your experience of the world. You bring your history and you read it in your own terms.” — Angela Carter

“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, The Brooklyn Follies

“To acquire the habit of reading is to construct for yourself a refuge from almost all the miseries of life.” — W. Somerset Maugham, Books and You

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

Funny Quotes

“Reading one book is like eating one potato chip.” — Diane Duane, So You Want to Be a Wizard

“Books were safer than other people anyway.” — Neil Gaiman, The Ocean at the End of the Lane

“I am an omnivorous reader with a strangely retentive memory for trifles.” — Arthur Conan Doyle, The Complete Sherlock Holmes

“People say that life is the thing, but I prefer reading.” — Logan Pearsall Smith

“The problem with books is that they end.” — Caroline Kepnes, You

“Words can be like X-rays if you use them properly — they’ll go through anything. You read and you’re pierced.” — Aldous Huxley, Brave New World

“Never trust anyone who has not brought a book with them.” — Lemony Snicket, Horseradish: Bitter Truths You Can’t Avoid

“Literature is the most agreeable way of ignoring life.” — Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet .

“No entertainment is so cheap as reading, nor any pleasure so lasting.” — Mary Wortley Montagu

“You can never get a cup of tea large enough or a book long enough to suit me.” — C.S. Lewis

“Everything in the world exists in order to end up as a book.” — Stéphane Mallarmé

Short Quotes About Books and Reading

“Books may well be the only true magic.” — Alice Hoffman

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

“The whole world opened to me when I learned to read.” — Mary McLeod Bethune

“Think before you speak. Read before you think.” — Fran Lebowitz, The Fran Lebowitz Reader

“A well-read woman is a dangerous creature.” — Lisa Kleypas, A Wallflower Christmas

“Reading brings us unknown friends” — Honoré de Balzac

“In the end, we’ll all become stories.” — Margaret Atwood, Moral Disorder and Other Stories

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

“Children are made readers on the laps of their parents.” — Emilie Buchwald

“If you only read the books that everyone else is reading, you can only think what everyone else is thinking.” — Haruki Murakami, Norwegian Wood

“A good book is an event in my life.” — Stendhal, The Red and the Black

“Some books should be tasted, some devoured, but only a few should be chewed and digested thoroughly.” — Sir Francis Bacon

“I have always imagined that Paradise will be a kind of library.” — Jorge Luis Borges

“The best books… are those that tell you what you know already.” — George Orwell, 1984

“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, The Shadow of the Wind

→ Read more short quotes

About Reading Making You a Better Writer

“You should write because you love the shape of stories and sentences and the creation of different words on a page. Writing comes from reading, and reading is the finest teacher of how to write.” — Annie Proulx

“Read, read, read. Read everything — trash, classics, good and bad, and see how they do it. Just like a carpenter who works as an apprentice and studies the master. Read! You’ll absorb it. Then write. If it’s good, you’ll find out. If it’s not, throw it out of the window.” — William Faulkner

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

“Either write something worth reading or do something worth writing.” — Benjamin Franklin

More Quotes & Captions

“There are many little ways to enlarge your child’s world. Love of books is the best of all.” — Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis

“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, Bad Feminist

“Writing and reading decrease our sense of isolation. They deepen and widen and expand our sense of life: they feed the soul… 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, Bird by Bird

“The reason that fiction is more interesting than any other form of literature, to those who really like to study people, is that in fiction the author can really tell the truth without humiliating himself.” — Eleanor Roosevelt

“Until I feared I would lose it, I never loved to read. One does not love breathing.” — Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird

“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

“A reader lives a thousand lives before he dies, said Jojen. The man who never reads lives only one.” — George R.R. Martin, A Dance with Dragons: A Song of Ice and Fire: Book Five

“What really knocks me out is a book that, when you’re all done reading it, you wish the author that wrote it was a terrific friend of yours and you could call him up on the phone whenever you felt like it. That doesn’t happen much, though.” — J.D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye

“The reading of all good books is like conversation with the finest people of the past centuries.” — Descartes

“Man reading should be man intensely alive. The book should be a ball of light in one’s hand.” — Ezra Pound

“Reading is my favourite occupation, when I have leisure for it and books to read.” — Anne Brontë, Agnes Grey

“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!

‍ You might also like: Calendar of Book Holidays | Calendar of Library Celebrations | Quotes About Banned Books

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wisdom quotes trending all quotes

100 Book Quotes Every Book Lovers Will Love

By Maxime Lagacé

Maxime is the founder of WisdomQuotes. He has been collecting quotes since 2004. His goal? To help you develop a calm and peaceful mind. Learn more about him on his about page .

Here are 100 of the most inspiring book quotes I could find. Hope you’ll find even more inspiration to read, learn and grow. Enjoy!

A book is a dream that you hold in your hands. Neil Gaiman

A good book is a creator of inwardness. Susan Sontag

I have always imagined paradise will be a kind of library. Jorge Luis Borges

Books are the training weights of the mind. Epictetus

Any book not worth rereading isn’t worth reading. Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Books let us into their souls and lay open to us the secrets of our own. William Hazlitt

Most of what makes a book ‘good’ is that we are reading it at the right moment for us. Alain de Botton

Buying books would be a good thing if one could also buy the time to read them in. Arthur Schopenhauer

The poet lights the light and fades away. But the light goes on and on. Emily Dickinson

The greatest books have more insights than one can absorb in a single reading. James Pierce

Stories are illusion. They are so powerful they invite delusion. Stewart Brand

Knowledge sets us free, art sets us free. A great library is freedom. Ursula K. Le Guin

That is a good book it seems to me, which is opened with expectation and closed with profit. Louisa May Alcott

The only important thing in a book is the meaning that it has for you. W. Somerset Maugham

If we encounter a man of rare intellect, we should ask him what books he reads. Ralph Waldo Emerson

• 100 Learning Quotes To Inspire You To Learn (Forever)
• 100 Knowledge Quotes That Will Change Your Perspective
• 100 Reading Quotes Every Book Lover Can Relate To

The Best Book Quotes

A book is proof that humans are capable of working magic. Carl Sagan

In a good book the best is between the lines. Swedish proverb

All great literature is one of two stories; a man goes on a journey or a stranger comes to town. Leo Tolstoy

Readers are plentiful, thinkers are rare. Harriet Martineau

Many a book is like a key to unknown chambers within the castle of one’s own self. Franz Kafka

One kind of good book should leave you asking: how did the author know that about me? Alain de Botton

Bad reading: when you rush through. Good reading: when you go slow. Wise reading: when you understand. Maxime Lagacé

The very greatest books only manage to illuminate the dark confusion of our lives like a brief brilliant firework. Alain de Botton

In the case of good books, the point is not how many of them you can get through, but rather how many can get through to you. Mortimer J. Adler

A book is something that can be read ten years after publication. A real book, twenty. Otherwise it is a magazine report with bookbinding. Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Let just as many books be acquired as are enough, but none for mere show. Seneca

Of all that is written, I love only what a man has written with his own blood. Friedrich Nietzsche

As a rule the purchase of books is mistaken for the appropriation of their contents. Arthur Schopenhauer

We’ve already discovered teleportation and time travel: a good book. Sahil Lavingia

I was dumb. I thought reading the classics would make me wise and educated. Now, I simply read the books that interest me. Maxime Lagacé

Part 1. Books are the carriers of civilization. Without books, history is silent, literature dumb, science crippled, thought and speculation at a standstill. Barbara Tuchman

Part 2. They are engines of change, windows on the world and lighthouses erected in the sea of time. They are companions, teachers, magicians, bankers of the treasures of the mind. Books are humanity in print . Barbara Tuchman

People who ask for book recommendations don’t read. Sahil Lavingia

Great books teach you something every time you read them. Angela Jiang

Beware of the person of one book. Thomas Aquinas

Books are not made for furniture, but there is nothing else that so beautifully furnishes a house. Henry Ward Beecher

A house is no home unless it contains food and fire for the mind as well as for the body. Margaret Fuller

I would rather read the 100 best books over and over again until I absorbed them, rather than read all the books. Naval Ravikant

The right book at the right time will speak to you in a way the right book at the wrong time just won’t. Naval Ravikant

My library is an archive of longings. Susan Sontag

Part 2. Book Quotes That Are…

The most famous book quotes (c.s. lewis, dr. seuss, emerson, etc.).

Good friends, good books and a sleepy conscience: this is the ideal life. Mark Twain

So many books, so little time. Frank Zappa

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

If a book is well written, I always find it too short. Jane Austen

The dearest ones of time, the strongest friends of the soul – books. Emily Dickinson

′Classic′ – a book which people praise and don’t read. Mark Twain

I was raised by books. Books, and then my parents. Elon Musk

Independent inquiry is needed in your search for truth, not dependence on anyone else’s view or a mere book. Bruce Lee

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 children’s story that can only be enjoyed by children is not a good children’s story in the slightest. C.S. Lewis

There is no friend as loyal as a book. Ernest Hemingway

I was with book, as a woman is with child. C.S. Lewis ( Till We Have Faces , Amazon book)

Your face is a book, where men may read strange matters. William Shakespeare

Literature and butterflies are the two sweetest passions known to man. Vladimir Nabokov

Throw away your books; stop letting yourself be distracted. Marcus Aurelius (It seems Marcus Aurelius was not a dreamer…)

When I get a little money I buy books; and if any is left I buy food and clothes. Desiderius Erasmus

It is my ambition to say in ten sentences what others say in a whole book. Friedrich Nietzsche

One always tends to overpraise a long book, because one has got through it. E. M. Forster

Anyone who reads a book with a sense of obligation does not understand the art of reading. Lin Yutang ( The Importance of Living , Amazon book)

There are two motives for reading a book: one, that you enjoy it; the other, that you can boast about it. Bertrand Russell

Sleep is good, he said, and books are better. George R. R. Martin

A lawyer without books would be like a workman without tools. Thomas Jefferson

A book worth reading is worth buying. John Ruskin

Some books leave us free and some books make us free. Ralph Waldo Emerson

Short Book Quotes

Go to table of contents

I water my mind with books. Susan Sontag

Words are life. Markus Zusak ( The Book Thief , Amazon book)

Books are absent teachers. Mortimer J. Adler

When I had nothing, I had books. Jola Tankoka

Read more books and fewer articles. Morgan Housel

Books are a uniquely portable magic. Stephen King

Your brain is a muscle and books are the weights. James Clear

Books may well be the only true magic. Alice Hoffman

No two persons ever read the same book. Edmund Wilson

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

Good books don’t give up all their secrets at once. Stephen King

I shall be miserable if I have not an excellent library. Jane Austen

Books have superpowers; they ground you and make you fly too. Maxime Lagacé

If you have a garden and a library, you have everything you need. Cicero

Read the best books first, or you may not have a chance to read them at all. Henry David Thoreau

Inspirational Book Quotes

There is no frigate like a book to take us lands away. Emily Dickinson

It is the nature of those books we call classics to wait patiently on the shelf for us to grow into them. Erica Jong

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

The test of literature is, I suppose, whether we ourselves live more intensely for the reading of it. Elizabeth Drew

Don’t read to show off, read to take off. Maxime Lagacé

My library serves as a visual reminder of what I don’t know. Shane Parrish

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

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

There is no better teacher than history in determining the future. There are answers worth billions of dollars in a $30 history book. Charlie Munger

A book lying idle on a shelf is wasted ammunition. Like money, books must be kept in constant circulation. Lend and borrow to the maximum – of both books and money! But especially books, for books represent infinitely more than money. 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

Books are funny little portable pieces of thought. Susan Sontag

Books are gateways into other worlds and other minds into which you cannot otherwise travel. Unknown

I’ll never forgive books for being 300 pages when they could have been 30. Unknown

Think how quiet a book is on a shelf, just sitting there, unopened. Then think what happens when you open it. Ali Smith

Some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed on and digested. Francis Bacon

Buying books isn’t spending, it’s investing. Sven Schnieders

Further Readings

• Topic: Education
• 100 Education Quotes That Will Inspire You To Keep Growing
• 100 Curiosity Quotes To Increase Your Desire To Learn
• 65 Growth Mindset Quotes (To Improve Your Life)
• 145 Thinking Quotes To Make You More Thoughtful
• 81 The Alchemist Quotes And Summary (Book by Paulo Coelho)
• What Book has the Most Page-for-Page Wisdom? (fs.blog)
• 210 History Quotes That Will Surprise And Inspire You
• 100 Humanity Quotes That Will Touch Your Heart
• 150 Art Quotes To Bring Out Your Inner Artist

Table Of Contents

Part 1 Top 15 Images Best Quotes

Part 2 Book Quotes That ARE Famous Short Inspirational

Part 3 Conclusion

Was this helpful?

"Knowing yourself is the beginning of all wisdom." -Aristotle

Copyright © 2004-2024

An Essential List of the 90 Best Quotes about Books

Even though I’m a book blogger and an author, I am frequently stumped for words that express how much I love books. That’s why I’m so grateful that many of the wisest and wittiest thinkers across time have managed to put what we love about books into words. This past summer, I finally decided to compile my bookish quote collection in one volume, which I published in July. Over the course of writing my book A Reader’s Library of Book Quotes , I gathered over 400 quotes about the importance of books and reading. (Read more about my bestselling bookish quote collection here.)

In this epic list of 90 bookish quotes, you’ll find a sampling of all the insightful, funny quotes about books I collected while curating my book quote anthology. This essential collection of 90 bookish quotes captures the life of a book worm and has many uses. For instance, if you’re looking for book quotes for Instagram captions (or Instagram captions for book pictures), ideas for inscriptions on gift books, and bookish quote decoration ideas, you’ve come to the right place. For thousands of years, books have inspired passion in readers. Now read some of the best of the best bookish quotes spanning time and space.

Want even more quotes? Check out my bestselling, ultimate collection of 400+ bookish quotes, A Reader’s Library of Book Quotes .

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Sarah S. Davis is the founder of Broke by Books, a blog about her journey as a schizoaffective disorder bipolar type writer and reader. Sarah's writing about books has appeared on Book Riot, Electric Literature, Kirkus Reviews, BookRags, PsychCentral, and more. She has a BA in English from the University of Pennsylvania, a Master of Library and Information Science from Clarion University, and an MFA in Writing for Children and Young Adults from Vermont College of Fine Arts.

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The 100 Best Quotes About Reading

You know our goal at Bookroo is to help you spend less time searching for books so you can spend more time reading! That’s why we’ve compiled a list of the 100 best quotes about reading. Read on to see the many insightful, witty, and motivating things that have been said about reading by authors, poets, scientists, artists, visionaries and even comedians.

Let us know in the comments below which is your favorite, and what quotes you would add to the list!

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

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

“ Never trust anyone who has not brought a book with them. ” - Lemony Snicket

“ You can never get a cup of tea large enough or a book long enough to suit me. ” - C.S. Lewis

“ Reading is essential for those who seek to rise above the ordinary. ” - Jim Rohn

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

“ ‘Classic’ – a book which people praise and don’t read. ” - Mark Twain

“ You don’t have to burn books to destroy a culture. Just get people to stop reading them. ” - Ray Bradbury

“ 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

“ 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

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

“ The reading of all good books is like conversation with the finest (people) of the past centuries. ” - Descartes

“ 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

“ Reading one book is like eating one potato chip. ” - Diane Duane

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

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

“ Books are a uniquely portable magic. ” - Stephen King

“ 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

“ Today a reader, tomorrow a leader. ” - Margaret Fuller

“ People can lose their lives in libraries. They ought to be warned. ” - Saul Bellow

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

“ Reading brings us unknown friends ” - Honoré de Balzac

“ The world was hers for the reading. ” - Betty Smith

“ I kept always two books in my pocket, one to read, one to write in. ” - Robert Louis Stevenson

“ The person who deserves most pity is a lonesome one on a rainy day who doesn’t know how to read. ” - Benjamin Franklin

“ Once you have read a book you care about, some part of it is always with you. ” - Louis L’Amour

“ Literature is the most agreeable way of ignoring life. ” - Fernando Pessoa

“ No. I can survive well enough on my own—if given the proper reading material. ” - Sarah J. Maas

“ There is more treasure in books than in all the pirate's loot on Treasure Island. ” - Walt Disney

“ 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

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

“ My alma mater was books, a good library…. I could spend the rest of my life reading, just satisfying my curiosity. ” - Malcolm X

“ It’s not that I don’t like people. It’s just that when I’m in the company of others – even my nearest and dearest – there always comes a moment when I’d rather be reading a book. ” - Maureen Corrigan

“ 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

“ There is nothing more luxurious than eating while you read—unless it be reading while you eat. ” - E. Nesbit

“ 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 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

“ Man reading should be man intensely alive. The book should be a ball of light in one’s hand. ” - Ezra Pound

“ If we encounter a man of rare intellect, we should ask him what books he reads. ” - Ralph Waldo Emerson

“ Always read something that will make you look good if you die in the middle of it. ” - P.J. O’Rourke

“ Many people, myself among them, feel better at the mere sight of a book. ” - Jane Smiley

“ Beware of the person of one book. ” - Thomas Aquinas

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

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

“ 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. ” - Frederick Douglas

“ There are many little ways to enlarge your child’s world. Love of books is the best of all. ” - Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis

“ Wear the old coat and buy the new book. ” - Austin Phelps

“ “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

“ The man who does not read good books is no better than the man who can’t. ” - Mark Twain

“ 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

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

“ Fill your house with stacks of books, in all the crannies and all the nooks. ” - Dr. Seuss

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

“ A classic is a book that has never finished saying what it has to say. ” - Italo Calvino

“ 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

“ 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 are going to get anywhere in life you have to read a lot of books. ” - Roald Dahl

“ That perfect tranquility 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

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

“ These books gave Matilda a hopeful and comforting message: You are not alone. ” - Roald Dahl

“ I guess there are never enough books. ” - John Steinbeck

“ 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

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

“ Children are made readers on the laps of their parents. ” - Emilie Buchwald

“ I couldn’t live a week without a private library – indeed, I’d part with all my furniture and squat and sleep on the floor before I’d let go of the 1500 or so books I possess. ” - H.P. Lovecraft

“ 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

“ Luckily, I always travel with a book, just in case I have to wait on line for Santa, or some such inconvenience. ” - David Levithan

“ Outside of a dog, a book is a man’s best friend. Inside of a dog, it’s too dark to read. ” - Groucho Marx

“ 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

“ I always read. You know how sharks have to keep swimming or they die? I’m like that. If I stop reading, I die. ” - Patrick Rothfuss

“ There is no Frigate like a Book To take us Lands away ” - Emily Dickinson

“ I intend to put up with nothing that I can put down. ” - Edgar Allan Poe

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

“ 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

“ 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! — 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

“ 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

“ Fools have a habit of believing that everything written by a famous author is admirable. For my part I read only to please myself and like only what suits my taste. ” - Voltaire

“ How many a man has dated a new era in his life from the reading of a book. ” - Henry David Thoreau

“ Reading is a basic tool in the living of a good life. ” - Mortimer J. Adler

“ 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

“ Finally, from so little sleeping and so much reading, his brain dried up and he went completely out of his mind. ” - Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra

“ 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

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

“ You're never too old, too wacky, 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 in its slot on a shelf, full of majestic potentiality, is the most comforting sort of intellectual wallpaper. ” - David Quammen

“ Reading should not be presented to children as a chore or a duty. It should be offered as a gift. ” - Kate DiCamillo

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60 Quotes About Reading That’ll Inspire You To Pick Up A Book

Open your heart (and a novel) to these words from authors and celebrities about their favorite pastime

• Quotes On The Magic Of Reading

Quotes For Book Lovers

Quotes about reading that will expand your horizons.

• Reading Quotes For Children

Fiordaliso / Getty Images

Few things are better than reading a good book on your porch on a warm summer night, but sometimes it’s nice to get some encouragement from other readers to get those pages turning. That’s why we’ve pulled some quotes about reading that are sure to satisfy every kind of reader. We even have some quotes about reading for the kids and students in your life . 

Taking the time to read can be an every day escape and opportunity to learn, but don’t just take our word for it; authors and celebrities alike have a deep love of reading and have plenty to say about it. Look through this list of quotes about reading, grab a snack or a glass of sweet tea , and pick up a book.

Quotes About The Magic Of Books

Southern Living

• “There is more treasure in books than in all the pirate's loot on Treasure Island.” ― Walt Disney
• “To learn to read is to light a fire; every syllable that is spelled out is a spark.” ― Victor Hugo
• “I declare after all there is no enjoyment like reading! How much sooner one tires of any thing 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 are the mirrors of the soul.”― Virginia Woolf
• “Reading furnishes the mind only with materials of knowledge; it is thinking that makes what we read ours.” ― John Locke
• “I can survive well enough on my own – if given the proper reading material.” ― Sarah J. Maas
• “Literature is my Utopia” ― Helen Keller
• “If a book is well written, I always find it too short.” ― Jane Austen
• “Some books are so familiar that reading them is like being home again.” ― Louisa May Alcott
• “Books are the plane, and the train, and the road. They are the destination, and the journey. They are home.” ― Anna Quindlen
• “Books are a uniquely portable magic.” ― Stephen King
• “A book is a gift you can open again and again.” ― Garrison Keillor
• “Until I feared I would lose it, I never loved to read. One does not love breathing.” ― Harper Lee
• “There is no friend as loyal as a book.”― Ernest Hemingway
• “Never trust anyone who has not brought a book with them.”― Lemony Snicket
• “The reading of all good books is like conversation with the finest (people) of the past centuries.” ― René Descartes
• “A room without books is like a body without a soul.” ― Cicero
• “You can never get a cup of tea large enough or a book long enough to suit me.” ― C.S. Lewis 
• “Read the best books first, or you may not have a chance to read them at all.” ― Henry David Thoreau
• “I think books are like people, in the sense that they’ll turn up in your life when you most need them.” ― Emma Thompson
• “I guess there are never enough books.” ― John Steinbeck
• “For my whole life, my favorite activity was reading. It’s not the most social pastime.” ― Audrey Hepburn
• “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
• “The reason that fiction is more interesting than any other form of literature, to those who really like to study people, is that in fiction the author can really tell the truth without humiliating himself.”― Eleanor Roosevelt
• “You will learn most things by looking, but reading gives understanding. Reading will make you free.” ― Paul Rand
• “I declare after all there is no enjoyment like reading! How much sooner one tires of any thing 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
• “I can feel infinitely alive curled up on the sofa reading a book.” ― Benedict Cumberbatch
• "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
• “What I love most about reading: It gives you the ability to reach higher ground. And keep climbing.” ― Oprah
• “Today a reader, tomorrow a leader.” ― Margaret Fuller
• “If we encounter a man of rare intellect, we should ask him what books he reads.” ― Ralph Waldo Emerson
• “I’ve always thought that a good book should be either the entry point inward, to learn about yourself, or a door outward, to open you up to new worlds.” ― Taylor Jenkins Reid
• "I'm reading so much and exposing myself to so many new ideas. It almost feels like the chemistry and the structure of my brain is changing so rapidly sometimes,” ― Emma Watson
• "Books are a form of political action. Books are knowledge. Books are reflection. Books change your mind," ― Toni Morrison
• “I have challenged myself that I will read thousands of books and I will empower myself with knowledge. Pens and books are the weapons that defeat terrorism,” ― Malala Yousafzai
• “Reading is to the mind what exercise is to the body.” ― Joseph Addison
• “Reading is a discount ticket to everywhere.”― Mary Schmich
• “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
• “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
• “Books can be dangerous. The best ones should be labeled “This could change your life.”― Helen Exley
• “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
• "One of the many gifts that books give readers is a connection to each other. When we share an affection for a writer, an author or a story, we also have a better understanding of people unlike ourselves. Books cultivate empathy." ― Sarah Jessica Parker 
• "All good books are alike in that they are truer than if they had really happened, and after you are finished reading one, you will feel that all that happened to you and afterwards it all belongs to you; the good and the bad, the ecstasy, the remorse and sorrow, the people and the places and how the weather was." ― Ernest Hemingway 
• "Either write something worth reading or do something worth writing." ― Benjamin Franklin

Quotes About Reading For Children And Students

• “There are many little ways to enlarge your child’s world. Love of books is the best of all.” ― Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis
• “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
• “A children’s story that can only be enjoyed by children is not a good children’s story in the slightest.” ― C.S. Lewis
• “Show me a family of readers, and I will show you the people who move the world.” ― Napoléon Bonaparte
• “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
• “Not all readers are leaders, but all leaders are readers.” ― Harry Truman
• "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 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 
• "Reading is the gateway skill that makes all other learning possible," ― Barack Obama 
• “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
• “Don’t give up reading, the more you practice, the easier it will get.” ― unknown
• “Let children read whatever they want and then talk about it with them.“ ― Judy Blume
• “A child who carries a book with a bookmark in it is in two places at the same time.” ― Tony Abbott
• “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 kept always two books in my pocket, one to read, one to write in.” ― Robert Louis Stevenson

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50 motivating quotes about books and reading.

The quotes about books you’ll see below are not the most famous ones. All of them, however, are highly motivating to rediscover the pleasure of reading.

You may ask, what book quotes have to do with the ebook site. Ebook sites are still mostly focused on the issues related to technology rather than pleasures of reading.

We believe that a reader has to learn only as much technology as it’s needed to fully enjoy the magic of reading. Reading in times of digital content is changing, but it doesn’t mean it gives less pleasure. Just the opposite.

There is absolutely no difference between a hardcover book or an audiobook or a multimedia book application. There is no difference between a high-quality paper and e-ink screen or a high-resolution Retina display.

The biggest pleasure comes from what we read, not from on what we read.

The real difference, though, lies in our attitude to reading. Gilbert K. Chesterton once said: “There is a great deal of difference between an eager man who wants to read a book and the tired man who wants a book to read.”

If you believe there are great quotes that should be added to the list, don’t hesitate to reach us on social media with your recommendations. Thanks!

50 best quotes about books and reading

Books are a uniquely portable magic. – Stephen King

This beautiful book quote was beautifully visualized by Risa Rodil. You can get the artwork from Redbubble, on a variety of products. Besides a number of posters, you can have iPad and iPhone cases, mugs, wall clocks, and even a duvet cover! And, yes, apparel is here, too.

⇢ Redbubble

No two persons ever read the same book. – Edmund Wilson

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

If we encounter a man of rare intellect, we should ask him what books he reads. – Ralph Waldo Emerson

I would never read a book if it were possible for me to talk half an hour with the man who wrote it. – Woodrow Wilson

Reading gives us someplace to go when we have to stay where we are. – Mason Cooley

Always read something that will make you look good if you die in the middle of it. – P.J. O’Rourke

Anyone who says they have only one life to live must not know how to read a book. – Author Unknown

I think of life as a good book. The further you get into it, the more it begins to make sense. – Harold Kushner

There is no friend as loyal as a book. – Ernest Hemingway

There are many little ways to enlarge your child’s world. Love of books is the best of all. – Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis

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

You can’t buy happiness, but you can buy books and that’s kind of the same thing. – Anonymous

The book you don’t read won’t help. – Jim Rohn

Great books help you understand, and they help you feel understood. – John Green

If you only read the books that everyone else is reading, you can only think what everyone else is thinking. – Haruki Murakami

A minimalist and stylish visualization of Murakami’s bright thought on how reading makes us exceptional.

A good novel tells us the truth about its hero; but a bad novel tells us the truth about its author. – Gilbert K. Chesterton

There is a great deal of difference between an eager man who wants to read a book and the tired man who wants a book to read. – Gilbert K. Chesterton

A book is a dream that you hold in your hand. – Neil Gaiman

This inspiring quote by Neil Gaiman is worth repeating every day. What about placing it in your bedroom right in front of your bed? You’ll see it when you open your eyes, or right before you’ll close them.

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

In a good book the best is between the lines. – Swedish Proverb

Are we not like two volumes of one book? – Marceline Desbordes-Valmore

We lose ourselves in books. We find ourselves there too. – Anonymous

Keep reading books, but remember that a book is only a book, and you should learn to think for yourself. – Maxim Gorky

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

So many books, so little time. – Frank Zappa

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

The books that the world calls immoral are books that show the world its own shame. – Oscar Wilde

Beware of the person of one book. – Thomas Aquinas

Between the pages of a book is a wonderful place to be. – Anonymous

A lovely flower typographic poster designed by Stella Bookish Arts is available on t-shirts, iPhone cases, travel mugs, tote bags and over thirty other items.

A book is the only place in which you can examine a fragile thought without breaking it. – Edward P. Morgan

If one cannot enjoy reading a book over and over again, there is no use in reading it at all. – Oscar Wilde

The only important thing in a book is the meaning that it has for you. – W. Somerset Maugham

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

Isn’t it one of these quotes that made our childhood a happy and inspiring time? A passage from I Can Read With My Eyes Shut! by Dr. Seuss was visualized by Dune Studio, and you can download it from Etsy in a quality matching posters from 5 × 7 to 16 × 20 inches.

Reading a book is like re-writing it for yourself. – Angela Carter

There’s nothing wrong with reading a book you love over and over. – Gail Carson Levine

Books can be dangerous. The best ones should be labeled “This could change your life.” – Helen Exley

This typographic art print was designed by Sacred and Profane and features a bold quote by Helen Exley on how a book can change people’s lives. The poster is available in two sizes, A4 or A3, but you can also order a custom size.

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

Make it a rule never to give a child a book you would not read yourself. – George Bernard Shaw

Some books leave us free and some books make us free. – Ralph Waldo Emerson

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 can never get a cup of tea large enough or a book long enough to suit me. – C.S. Lewis

C.S. Lewis is the author of several meaningful quotes about books and reading, and we feature a few of them in this list. The one shown above is beautifully designed by Violet and Alfie. You can get it in one of four colors.

Where is human nature so weak as in the bookstore? – Henry Ward Beecher

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

Read the best books first, or you may not have a chance to read them at all. – Henry David Thoreau

One always has a better book in one’s mind than one can manage to get onto paper. – Michael Cunningham

I divide all readers into two classes; those who read to remember and those who read to forget. – William Lyon Phelps

In old days books were written by men of letters and read by the public. Nowadays books are written by the public and read by nobody. – Oscar Wilde

There comes a time when you have to choose between turning the page and closing the book. – Josh Jameson

When there comes a time you decide to hang your favorite book quote on a wall, make sure to check out the artwork from The Writing Craft. This quote by Josh Jameson is available on over 40 products: apparel, home decor, personal accessories, and more.

There are worse crimes than burning books. One of them is not reading them. – Joseph Brodsky

What you don’t know would make a great book. – Sydney Smith

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 cannot sleep unless I am surrounded by books. – Jorge Luis Borges

We read to know that we are not alone. – William Nicholson

Men do not understand books until they have a certain amount of life, or at any rate no man understands a deep book, until he has seen and lived at least part of its contents. – Ezra Pound

That is a good book which is opened with expectation and closed with profit. – Amos Bronson Alcott

Once you learn to read, you will be forever free. – Frederick Douglas

Books are like mirrors: if a fool looks in, you cannot expect a genius to look out. – J.K. Rowling

A book is a device to ignite the imagination. – Alan Bennett

I lived in books more than I lived anywhere else. – Neil Gaiman

It’s not just the books under fire now that worry me. It is the books that will never be written. The books that will never be read. – Judy Blume

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 book has no ending. – R.D. Cumming

And the last beautiful quote about books turned into a beautiful visual. Hand-lettered by Teri Lea Wright, this 8×10 typographic poster is printed on high-quality matte photo paper.

Keep exploring. Here are more lists and tips for book lovers:

• Free ebooks for Christmas 2023: here are the top 20 downloads Just like a year ago, we are presenting the list of ebooks that were most downloaded from Project Gutenberg in […]
• 12 best personalized gifts for librarians and library supporters These library-themed gifts are extremely easy to personalize. All you have to do is add your own text!
• Here are the 12 best iPhone case covers for book lovers In this updated overview, you’ll see gorgeous iPhone covers that will remind you of the joy of reading books anywhere, […]
• 12 best metal accessories and home decor for book lovers Explore some of the best home decor items for book lovers that are handmade from metal: steel, brass, copper, bolts, […]

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35+ Quotes About Books That Truly Speak to Bibliophiles

Celebrate your literary love with these entertaining quotes about books that will inspire you to dive into your next story.

Novels, memoirs, short stories, essay compilations, and more continue to shape who we are and how we view the world, no matter what format—physical book, ebook, or audiobook—we use to absorb and enjoy them. Books are pathways into different worlds and different lives, and one can never be truly bored with a good book. Here are some of the best quotes about books, whether you love to read or listen.

Quotes About Books and Reading

Between work, family, chores, and more, it’s all too easy to let life get in the way of the pleasure of spending time with books. Whether you’ve let your cherished hobby lag or you’re a devoted reader and listener, these quotes will remind you of what you love about settling down with the perfect story.

1. “That's the thing about books. They let you travel without moving your feet.” – Jhumpa Lahiri, The Namesake

2. "Books are a uniquely portable magic." – Stephen King, On Writing

3. “A reader lives a thousand lives before he dies.” – George R. R. Martin, A Dance with Dragons

4. “Until I feared I would lose it, I never loved to read. One does not love breathing.” – Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird

5. “I lived in books more than I lived anywhere else.” – Neil Gaiman, The Ocean at the End of the Lane

6. “Books must be read as deliberately and reservedly as they were written.” – Henry David Thoreau, Walden  

7. "The magic is only in what books say, how they stitched the patches of the universe together into one garment for us." – Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451

8. “He liked the mere act of reading, the magic of turning scratches on a page into words inside his head.” – John Green, An Abundance of Katherines 

9. “Words can be like X-rays if you use them properly—they’ll go through anything. You read and you’re pierced.” – Aldous Huxley, Brave New World 

10.  “How many a man has dated a new era in his life from the reading of a book.” – Henry David Thoreau, Walden   

11. “Come to a book as you would come to an unexplored land. Come without a map. Explore it, and draw your own map.” – Stephen King, Hearts in Atlantis

Quotes About Books and Knowledge

Whether they revolve around family dynamics or romantic relationships, or focus on career goals or personal challenges, books really do have the answers to all of our questions. We learn so much from works of literature, and the knowledge we can gain from authors of the past and present is indispensable. Read on for some quotes to inspire your next mind-expanding listen. 

12. “One must always be careful of books... and what is inside them, for words have the power to change us.” – Cassandra Clare, Clockwork Angel

13. “Books are mirrors: you only see in them what you already have inside you.” – Carlos Ruiz Zafon, The Shadow of the Wind

14. “The books that the world calls immoral are books that show the world its own shame.” – Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray

15. “The best books... are those that tell you what you know already.” – George Orwell, 1984

16. “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!

17. “If you only read the books that everyone else is reading, you can only think what everyone else is thinking.” – Haruki Murakami, Norwegian Wood

18. “One child, one teacher, one book and one pen can change the world.” – Malala Yousafzai, I Am Malala

19. “A good novel tells us the truth about its hero; but a bad novel tells us the truth about its author.” – G.K. Chesterton, Heretics

20. “If the reader prefers, this book may be regarded as fiction. But thereis always the chance that such a book of fiction may throw some light on what has been written as fact.” – Ernest Hemingway, A Moveable Feast

Quotes About the Pure Love of Books 

The ability to make the reader or listener fall in love with a book and its characters takes more than skill—writers must have a true passion for words and stories. These quotes demonstrate just how much love writers have for their craft.

21. “A truly good book is something as natural, and as unexpectedly and unaccountably fair and perfect, as a wild flower discovered on the prairies of the West or in the jungles of the East.” – Henry David Thoreau, Walking

22. “I declare after all there is no enjoyment like reading! How much sooner one tires of anything than of a book!” – Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice

23. “It is remarkable, the character of the pleasure we derive from the best books.” – Ralph Waldo Emerson, Self-Reliance and Other Essays

24. “A half-read book is a half-finished love affair.” – David Mitchell, Cloud Atlas

25. “When a long book succeeds, the writer and reader are not just having an affair; they are married.” – Stephen King, The Bazaar of Bad Dreams

26. “A classic is a successful book that has survived the reaction of the next period or generation. Then it's safe, like a style in architecture or furniture. It's acquired a picturesque dignity to take the place of its fashion.” – F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Beautiful and Damned

27. “And books! ...she would buy them all over and over again; she would buy up every copy, I believe, to prevent their falling into unworthy hands; and she would have every book that tells her how to admire an old twisted tree.” – Jane Austen, Sense and Sensibility

28. “Books are the treasured wealth of the world and the fit inheritance of generations and nations.” – Henry David Thoreau, Walden

Funny Quotes About Books

We often turn to books for deep insights, or moving and dramatic tales. But sometimes, all you need from a book is a good laugh. Literature can be serious, but it can also be light and silly and absurd—which these quotes demonstrate perfectly.

29. “There are two motives for reading a book: one, that you enjoy it; the other, that you can boast about it.” – Bertrand Russell, The Conquest of Happiness

30. “Books were safer than other people anyway.” – Neil Gaiman, The Ocean at the End of the Lane

31. “Give me a man or woman who has read a thousand books and you give me an interesting companion. Give me a man or woman who has read perhaps three and you give me a very dangerous enemy indeed.” – Anne Rice, The Witching Hour

32. “To a bibliophile, there is but one thing better than a box of new books, and that is a box of old ones.” – Will Thomas, Some Danger Involved

33. “Every author ought to write every book as if he were going to be beheaded the day he finished it.” – F. Scott Fitzgerald, This Side of Paradise

34. “I have tried to write by the old rule that how good a book is should be judged by the man who writes it by the excellence of the material that he eliminates.” – Ernest Hemingway, A Moveable Feast

35. “Like most uneducated Englishwomen, I like reading—I like reading books in the bulk.” – Virginia Woolf, A Room of One's Own

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88 Best Quotes About Books & Reading

Posted: December 1, 2023 | Last updated: January 5, 2024

Malala Yousafzai

Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice

Charles Baudelaire

F. Scott Fitzgerald

Stephen King, On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft

Virginia Woolf, A Room of One's Own

Maya Angelou

Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451

Walt Disney

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Charles W. Eliot

Arnold Lobel

Kate DiCamillo

LeVar Burton

Louis L'Amour

François Mauriac

Diane Duane, So You Want to Be a Wizard

Stéphane Mallarmé

Alice Hoffman

Honoré de Balzac

Carlos Ruiz Zafón, The Shadow of the Wind

Annie Proulx

Benjamin Franklin

Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis

Dr. Seuss, I Can Read With My Eyes Shut!

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The Print Handwriting Workbook for Teens: Learn the Art of Penmanship in this Writing Practice book with Inspirational Quotes and Activities for Teenagers and Young Adults Paperback – March 9, 2023

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The Print Handwriting Workbook for Teens by Modern Kid Press

The Print Handwriting Workbook for Teens helps teens and young adults practice and sharpen their print handwriting skills. Grow and refine your modern print handwriting through practicing the alphabet, numbers, words and sentences. Then head off on your own with thoughtful open ended prompts! Teens will learn to write clearly and consistently with a modern take to print handwriting. We have included uplifting words and phrases throughout this book to not only perfect your handwriting but also to encourage and affirm the writer!

The Print Handwriting Workbook for Teens includes:

• Suitable for teens 12 to 18
• Printed on high quality interior stock
• Cute and fun tutorials with easy to follow instructions
• Inspirational words, phrases and prompts!
• Space for creative writing in modern print!

About Modern Kid Press Press

Modern Kid Press is a family-run publishing company based in San Antonio, Texas. We take a modern approach to children’s books that focuses on making learning fun, engaging, and even a little bit silly to help kids develop hands-on skills while minimizing their screen time.

• Print length 79 pages
• Language English
• Publication date March 9, 2023
• Dimensions 8.5 x 0.18 x 11 inches
• ISBN-10 195284293X
• ISBN-13 978-1952842931
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Product details

• Publisher ‏ : ‎ Modern Kid Press (March 9, 2023)
• Language ‏ : ‎ English
• Paperback ‏ : ‎ 79 pages
• ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 195284293X
• ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1952842931
• Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 9.3 ounces
• Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 8.5 x 0.18 x 11 inches
• #44 in Handwriting Reference (Books)

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The 10 Best Johnny Sack Quotes in 'The Sopranos,' Ranked

Brilliant and ruthless. That's the Johnny Sack way.

HBO's The Sopranos was a monumental drama series that ultimately set the bar with an epic cast of characters and original writing that, today, still makes it one of the greatest shows in television history. Created by David Chase, The Sopranos follows the life and times of New Jersey mob boss, Tony Soprano, played by the legendary James Gandolfini, who begins to see a psychiatrist to help him cope with his mental health as well as his family and his unconventional career choice. The award-winning series features a string of pivotal characters, but New York's Johnny "Sack" Sacrimoni lands in a category all on his own.

Played by the brilliant Vincent Curatola , Johnny Sack (who is partially inspired by The Dapper Don, John Gotti ) is the perfect blend of a modern gangster who is noted for his top-of-the-line style and no-nonsense demeanor, making him a major fan favorite among diehard Sopranos fans. Out of all the character's wise guy one-liners and beautifully spun remarks, these are the 10 best Johnny Sack quotes in The Sopranos , ranked.

The Sopranos

10 "if there are flies on you, they're payin' f****in' rent.", "pax soprana" - season 1, episode 6.

When Tony ( James Gandolfini ) secretly asks Johnny Sack to speak on behalf of Hesh Rabkin ( Jerry Alder ) during a sit down with Uncle Junior ( Dominic Chianese ), he knows exactly how to put on a convincing show. Always the flattering showman, he compliments Junior's wit and negotiation tactics without ever letting on that he and Tony had already worked out an agreement and seals the deal with one of the best Johnny Sack quotes.

Johnny is the classic mafioso who knows how to speak the language, especially to the old-school guys like Junior . While it's obvious that he's overselling Junior in season one, episode six, "Pax Soprana," he just knows how to play the game, saying just the right words like this top-notch metaphoric one-liner to play him right into his hands.

9 "Phil treats nickels like manhole covers."

"marco polo" - season 5, episode 8.

With Tony and Phil Leotardo ( played by Goodfellas ' star, Frank Vincent ) at odds over a financial issue, Tony visits Johnny to speak to him about their ongoing problem and to see if he will play a mediator to help them settle their dispute. Johnny tries to remain unbiased, but he does agree with Tony that Phil can be a bit of a cheapskate, but never being one to flat-out say something of that nature, he spins the comment into a rather humorous innuendo.

In season five, episode eight, 'Marco Polo,' Johnny has fully immersed himself in the role of boss and, to avoid appearing to take sides against one of his own, he patronizes Tony with his expert skill of choosing his words wisely, but not without a twist of humor. Throughout the series, Johnny is known for his original remarks, but this one is easily one of the character's best and exceptionally unique .

8 "Nobody's talking to you!"

"christopher" - season 4, episode 3.

After Johnny learns about Ralph Cifaretto's ( Joe Pantoliano ) insensitive joke about his wife, he's rightfully upset, but instead of addressing the issue right away, he bottles up his anger until it starts to bubble over. When he sits down with Tony and the guys to discuss business matters, he tries to put his emotions aside and remain professional, but Ralphie makes the mistake of chiming in, which Johnny immediately takes as an opportunity to verbally smack his mouth shut.

Johnny's abrupt remark to Ralphie in season four, episode three, "Christopher," reveals how quickly he can flip on a dime and a warning to those to not be fooled by his calm and collected demeanor . Viewers obviously understand why he reacted the way he did, but how he leaves everyone at the table completely dumbfounded without ever giving an explanation is why Johnny is such an intimidating force.

7 "Speak!"

"for all debts public and private" - season 4, episode 1.

Johnny is usually a crafty wordsmith, but in season four, episode one, 'For All Debts Public and Private,' he demonstrates how he can quickly give the impression of being strictly business. When Paulie ( Tony Sirico ) is arrested for a misdemeanor, he gives Johnny a call from jail, who answers with one single word that defines the character's utmost authority and reputation for playing it safe.

Unaware of who is calling him, Johnny gives a smooth answer to let the caller know "this better be good and it better quick" in an effort to avoid staying on the phone longer than he needs (or wants) to. When he realizes it's a call from Paulie, his demeanor shifts into the ever-concerning friend who, unbeknownst to Paulie, has been lying and pandering to his woes about Tony to get insider information. While this is a very short Johnny Sack quote, it is vital to the character and, surprisingly, a top-tier quote among Sopranos fans .

6 "This Ralph's more creative than f***in' Spielberg."

"the weight" - season 4, episode 4.

When Tony learns that Johnny put one of his associates in the hospital, he demands an explanation from John, who finally reveals that he knows about Ralphie making a joke about his wife's weight. While Tony tries to play dumb as though he didn't hear it, Johnny's anger over Ralphie's disrespectful comment comes pouring out, but he also can't help but admit that Ralphie does have a knack for creativity.

Even when Johnny tries to degrade Ralphie in season four, episode four, "The Weight," which is easily one of the funniest Sopranos episodes , he still somehow comes up with a comical insult that still gives someone credit where credit is due. Understandably, Johnny feels betrayed by Ralphie, especially since he originally helped him sort out his issues with Tony, but his comparison of Ralphie to Oscar-winning director, Steven Spielberg, is one of Johnny Sack's classiest quips .

5 "What's this? The f***in' U.N. now?!"

"where's johnny" - season 5, episode 3.

After Angelo Garepe ( Joe Santos ) approaches Tony about Johnny's issue with Lorraine Calluzo ( Patti D'Arbanville ) , Tony meets with Johnny to discuss a potential compromise about splitting the role of boss. While Tony makes a valid point that it would take the heat off one single person from the authorities, Johnny is baffled that Tony would make such a recommendation, responding with a random (and hysterical) reference to the United Nations.

Tony's proposition to Johnny in season five, episode three, "Where's Johnny?" captures the comedic brilliance of the character while also expressing Johnny's extreme displeasure at such a ridiculous suggestion . Usually a simple "no" would suffice, but Johnny is cut from a different cloth than most people and his over-the-top reaction and ball-bustin' comparison is exactly what fans would expect from a bigger-than-life character like John.

4 "Have you read an issue of GQ in the past three or four years?"

"mr. & mrs. john sacrimoni request..." - season 6, episode 5.

After pleading guilty to several felony charges, Johnny is able to get out of prison to attend his daughter's wedding but is required to be escorted by federal agents. When the agents arrive at Johnny's cell, they're also with his attorney, who brought him his attire for the event, but unfortunately, everything isn't up to John's fashion standards, causing him to hurl a typical insult full of sarcasm that is a top-tier Johnny Sack quote.

John's remark to his attorney in season six, episode five, "Mr. and Mrs. John Sacrimoni..." summarizes the character in less than a sentence, as everyone knows fashion is a top priority for John, especially when it comes to an event like his daughter's wedding. One would think he would be more upset about the situation and having to have constant escorts around, but no, the true annoyance for Johnny is his attorney's extreme lack of fashion sense, making this one of the character's absolute best quotes in The Sopranos .

3 "You know, it wasn't long ago I remember you used to wait in the car and, as far as I'm concerned, you should still be there!"

While New York is still engaged in a civil war over who will take over as boss, Tony warns Christopher ( Michael Imperioli ) not to put his two cents on it while they are on their way to meet with Johnny. When the subject comes up, Christopher appears to have forgotten or not even heard what Tony recently said and makes the foolish mistake of trying to give Johnny some advice about how to solve his problem.

Johnny's response to Christopher in season five, episode three, "Where's Johnny?" marks one of the character's all-time best quotes, which also reiterates what happens when someone manages to get on Johnny's bad side. Never one to mince words, Johnny goes all out on Christopher who, honestly, got exactly the kind of response he deserved and should have known better to not poke the bear.

2 "Being a rat where I come from, is like asking someone like you to be a f***in' Nazi."

"moe n' joe" - season 6, episode 10.

After being arrested by federal authorities, Johnny sits down with his lawyer to discuss the terms of a potential plea agreement. His attorney mentions how providing information on other associates to the authorities would help him out, but as John stated to him before, he refuses to become a rat, painting a clear, straightforward picture to his attorney of what he would be asking of him. Out of all the characters in The Sopranos , John's one of the few who is willing to live and die for this thing, refusing to flip on others to save his own skin, which makes him one of the best characters of the show's sixth season .

In season six, episode 10, "Moe n' Joe," he makes his point crystal clear to his attorney, who is Jewish, by putting things into terms that he would understand, and while it's a bit of an extreme comparison, it sheds light on John's unwavering loyalty, which makes it one of the character's top quotes . Even though he is most likely going to live out the rest of his life behind bars, he would rather rot in a prison cell than become what he and the other guys adamantly despise.

1 "You either deliver that prick to my door, or I will rain a s***storm down on you and your family like you have never f***in' seen!"

"long term parking" - season 5, episode 12.

When Tony B. ( Steve Buscemi ) kills Billy Leotardo ( Chris Caldovino ), Phil is out for blood and wants Tony B. to pay for what he's done, but with Tony B. nowhere to be found, he resorts to having John stepping in and getting him what he wants. Tony agrees to meet with John but when he sees that Phil is also there, he feels ambushed and refuses to give up his cousin. Irritated by Tony's lack of cooperation, John makes it abundantly clear what will happen if Tony doesn't hand over his cousin.

John, who is the newly appointed New York boss, flexes his new position of power in the fifth season's best episode, episode 12, "Long Term Parking," with his finest and without a doubt best quote in the entire series . John is typically a reasonable man who usually never has any serious problems with Tony, but this is one moment where he lets Tony know that this isn't personal, it's strictly business. If Tony doesn't want to resolve the issue with words, John is more than willing to resort to violence and bloodshed to get justice.

Every season of The Sopranos can be streamed on Max in the U.S.

Watch on Max

KEEP READING: The 10 Best Tony Soprano Quotes in 'The Sopranos'

The 7 biggest home-staging mistakes people make when trying to sell their house

• Home staging can significantly increase a home's value .
• Staged homes sell 88% faster and for 20% more than non-staged homes, a report found.
• Interior designer Dan Mazzarini and home stager Meridith Baer shared common home-staging mistakes.

There are a few common mistakes when preparing your home for sale that can deter potential buyers.

Business Insider spoke to Dan Mazzarini, an interior designer and the creative director at BHDM Design , and Meridith Baer, the owner of Los Angeles-based luxury home-staging company Meridith Baer Home , about the biggest mistakes people make when staging.

Home staging can seriously up the value of your home when trying to attract a buyer, research shows.

A survey by the National Association of Realtors conducted in 2021 found that 82% of buyers' agents said home staging made it easier for their buyers to visualize themselves in the home.

A 2023 report by Realtor.com also found that staged homes sell 88% faster and for an average of 20% more than non-staged homes.

Here are the biggest home-staging mistakes people make when trying to sell their house.

Leaving up all the "Live, Laugh, Love" pillows and quotes around your home.

You might love your "Live, laugh, love" pillow or "Memories made here" kitchen sign, but Dan Mazzarini said you should remove those personal touches when staging your home for buyers.

"Staging to sell is about cleaning up. It's about a simplification, and it's about putting away the personal," Mazzarini told Business Insider. "While you want people to understand how they would live in a home, you don't want them to necessarily focus on you and your personal style in the home."

"You're trying to create a pretty general canvas to attract as many people as possible because you want that top dollar," he added.

Keeping personal items like family photos and kids' toys out in the open.

Family photos can help create a personalized, cozy atmosphere, but they're not the best decor when it comes to home staging.

"You want to make sure that buyers immediately go, 'This is how I want to live,'" Meridith Baer said. "So, obviously, they don't want to see your family photographs all over the place. They want to see themselves living there."

Mazzarini also recommended taking out family photos and kids' toys.

"All those things have to come down because while it is your personal taste, it also reflects your personal values," Mazzarini said.

If you do want to keep a few toys out to appeal to parents, Baer said to opt for neutral, high-quality ones that don't grab too much attention — and to keep them organized in a kid's room, rather than in the main living space.

Cluttering the living room with excess throw pillows, books, and trinkets.

Baer's biggest tip for home staging, especially in the living room, is to get rid of any clutter.

"Our advice to sellers is to get rid of as much junk as possible," she said. "You want it to look easy to live there, so you want to declutter."

"You don't need 20 pillows on a sofa or a bed, even if that's how you like to live," Mazzarini added.

Bookshelves are one area of the home that can easily become cluttered with junk. To remedy this, Baer recommended wrapping brightly colored books in paper or turning them backward so that the pages face out for a more neutral look.

Leaving clutter like cookbooks and small appliances on your kitchen counters.

Mazzarini and Baer both suggested tidying your kitchen counters and removing items like small appliances before a showing to avoid making the space look smaller and disorganized.

"This is the time to clean it up, clean the surfaces, and make it look and smell great," Mazzarini said.

Baer said, "You want to put away as much as you possibly can. It might be convenient to have it all out, but you want to hide anything that isn't pretty. I always love putting bowls of fresh fruit and maybe some flowers in the kitchen."

Not replacing your old bedding or towels with fresh linens.

Baer said that replacing your old towels and bed linens with new ones is one way to freshen up a space without spending a lot of money.

"That's stuff that doesn't cost a lot, but really makes a huge difference," she said.

Mazzarini suggested purchasing white towels and bedding from budget-friendly retailers such as Target or T.J. Maxx to give your bathrooms and bedrooms a new look.

Leaving dirty or half-used toiletries and shampoo bottles in your bathroom and shower.

Half-empty or multicolored shampoo and toiletry bottles can create a messy look that detracts from the amenities and overall look of your bathroom.

"Only keep out on the counter things that are generally pretty and maybe of the same color or the same ilk," Baer said.

To create a streamlined look, Baer advised putting all toiletry bottles away or transferring your products to simple, neutral glass bottles to create a hotel-like atmosphere.

Forgetting to put away any valuables or jewelry you wouldn't want to go missing.

It might not affect the sale, but Baer said it's always a good idea to put items like jewelry or valuable personal items in a safe space before staging or showing your home.

"People should not keep any valuables, jewelry, or watches lying around, everything should be locked up," Baer said. "Because you never know, right, when you're showing it."

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Renee Fleming’s new book: Selected quotes

norman lebrecht

April 09, 2024

The soprano has a wellness book out today.

Here are some clips from contributors:

“If you ask a scientist why birds sing, the answer will deal in courtship and territory. But if you asked the bird, and if you could understand its reply, it would probably be something like, ‘Because I have to, and it feels so good.’” – Richard Powers, “The Parting Glass”

“I was trying to stretch and discovered I couldn’t move. I started to cry and went to John and said, ‘I can’t go on.’” – Rosanne Cash, “Rabbit Hole”

“The early morning Wabanaki ceremony welcoming the sun was more than an encounter in a beautiful setting; it was an act of culture, a renewal of tradition, an acknowledgment of humanity’s place in nature, and a message of hope.” – Yo-Yo Ma, “Nature, Culture, and Healing”

“Imagine a world in which music and the visual arts, dance and movement, theater and storytelling, architecture and design, and many other art modalities are as common in the clinical arsenal as drugs and surgery.” – Susan Magsamen and Ruth Katz, “Blueprint for Cultivating the Field of Neuroarts”

“What possible survival benefit could musical behaviors have had for human ancestors, such that natural (or sexual) selection made musicality part of our evolved psychology?” – Aniruddh D. Patel, “Musicality, Evolution, and Animal Responses to Music”

“Theater, like the medical profession, explores the mystery of life and of death. Americans do not want to face death.” – Anna Deavere Smith, “Healing Arts”

“Slowly, the part of my brain that was studying music was overtaken by the part of my heart that felt it. I was moved by a scene, and later an aria, and sometimes a single note.” – Ann Patchett, “How to Fall in Love with Opera”

“Things start to appear. There seemed to be a crossing with no sign… And then, walking toward me was an elderly dervish…The man asked me my name and asked if I was lost.” – Zakir Hussain, “Music and Mysticism”

“Modern architecture and medicine are bound together in an endless battle against illness.” – Liz Diller, “Porous Density”

“Playing in prisons, there’s often this false idea that the musicians are offering a priceless gift to the poor incarcerated communities and that the energy only flows one way. This is never, ever true.” – Rhiannon Giddens, “How Music Shows Us What It Means to Be Human”

“John volunteered to go first, an unusual act for him. He said that his painting was called the Heart of Darkness and that it represented his heart. He then explained…‘My heart doesn’t have arteries, it is completely disconnected. Like me.’.” – Juliet L. King and Anjan Chatterjee, “Art Therapy, Psychology, and Neuroscience: A Timely Convergence”

Good God. Look to past artists to see how to secure a legacy and not to hang on to celebrity by your fingernails. Ms. Fleming continues to diminish her career accomplishments with her extracurricular endeavors.

“So little? So little, you say. Why, if it’s nothing else, it’s applause. It’s like waves of love coming across the footlights wrapping you up. Imagine, to know every night different hundreds of people love you. Their eyes shine. You please them. They want you. You belong. Just that alone is worth anything.”

I had to google your quote, as at first I thought it might be a joke, but now I can see where the reference is coming from. There are indeed artists suffering from the delusion that “waves of love” are indeed coming from the audience, perhaps unaware that love should be a much more private, much more selective and meaningful emotion that is not meant to happen on a massive scale.

On the other hand, Fischer-Dieskau too wrote a book, but it was a comparative study of Wagner and Nietzsche — not quite as marketable.

Please let us know when the toilet paper version is available.

For a soprano that gives me the ick, this is going to be an uncomfortable read.

Reading the comments on slipped disc is enough to destabilise any musician’s mental health! What exactly is the point of publishing these ‘contributions’ to her book out of context?

They are as she published them.

Have to think that the dismissiveness and sour disapproval here are from ignorance of the book, since no detail except the excerpted quotes is supplied. I just got the ebook. It’s an anthology of essays by leading scientists, music therapists, artists, and institutional leaders about the latest research and experience of the impact of arts engagement and arts therapies on health. How editing and publishing such a collection could diminish anyone’s legacy is a mystery, but pretentious commenters are always ready with a sneer at what they apparently don’t understand. Mozart might indeed weep to see someone blithely dismiss the work of dozens of brilliant people studying the arts we all claim to love dismissed as toilet paper, without the merest thought of engaging with the work.

Tom Service needs her on his new show!

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