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:
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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
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!
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