Reading is an incredible language process, a means for obtaining knowledge, sharing information, ideas and communication. It has the power to take you to a number of magical places and alert your imagination as well as take you into the lives of others. It is one major way the mind grows in its ability and develops in skills such as listening. When someone exposes himself to it, he enters a world of meaningful understanding of any topic he chooses. The variety available has always been endless and endless.
Apart from knowledge which helps in all aspects in life, from simple daily conversations to manners and more educated and selective development, it is a mental stimulation and enhances focus and concentration. There’s nothing better than having the ability to get away to a different world of your choice and even more so to be able to learn about countless great figures of the world in biographies, art, history, architecture, poetry and countless more. Picking up a book on a daily basis will exercise the brain and cognitive stimulation, will be of benefit as you can lose yourself in a great story and get rid of the day’s tension, and is everlasting in acquiring more knowledge to be better equipped to tackle challenges. This automatically boosts confidence and can even aid your career. Most important though, the main benefit is to be more developed and well-read for yourself, for your own personal advantage.
Here you will find a variety of quotes to inspire and motivate others, loved ones and friends, to give in to a world of words which can change their life into a brighter, more intelligent future.
Table of Contents
- Short Reading Quotes
- Best Reading Quotes
- Funny Reading Quotes
- Reading Quotes for Kids
- Inspirational Reading Quotes
- Reading Book Quotes
- Famous Reading Quotes
- Long Reading Quotes
- Poetic Quotes About Reading
- Reading Quotes On Images
Short Reading Quotes
- Reading is probably another way of being in a place.
- I read a book one day and my whole life was changed.
- Reading brings us unknown friends.
- Books are a uniquely portable magic.
- Of all things, I liked books the best.
- We read to know we’re not alone.
- A good book is an event in my life.
- All I have learned, I learned from books.
- Reading is to the mind what exercise is to the body.
- If you don’t like to read, you haven’t found the right book.
- Sleep is good, he said, and books are better.
- People say that life is the thing, but I prefer reading.
- Never put off till tomorrow the book you can read today.
- Ah, how good it is to be among people who are reading.
- Books are absent teachers.
- Everything in the world exists in order to end up as a book.
- You’ll never be alone if you’ve got a book.
- I can feel infinitely alive curled up on the sofa reading a book.
- For my whole life, my favorite activity was reading.
- Read the best books first, or you may not have a chance to read them at all.
- I have never known any distress that an hour’s reading did not relieve.
- Literature is my Utopia.
- We live for books.
- Literature is the most agreeable way of ignoring life. The Book of Disquiet
- A word after a word after a word is power.
- Only a generation of readers will spawn a generation of writers.
- Literature is news that stays news. ABC of Reading
- What art offers is space – a certain breathing room for the spirit.
- I am a machine condemned to devour books.
- It is not all books that are as dull as their readers.
- He loved books, those undemanding but faithful friends. Les Misérables
- We read frequently if unknowingly, in quest of a mind more original than our own.
- A writer only begins a book. A reader finishes it.
- Reading without reflecting is like eating without digesting.
- Get books, sit yourself down anywhere, and go to reading them yourself.
- Not all readers are leaders, but all leaders are readers.
- Reading is to the mind what exercise is to the body.
- Be kind to animals and birds, and read all you can.
- After three days without reading, talk becomes flavourless. Chinese Proverb
- I look at every book as a self-help book.
- I love the smell of book ink in the morning.
- Easy reading is damn hard writing.
- I read for pleasure and that is the moment I learn the most.
- Rainy days should be spent at home with a cup of tea and a good book.
- A book you finish reading is not the same book it was before you read it.
- I guess there are never enough books.
- To learn to read is to light a fire; every syllable that is spelled out is a spark.
- The reading of all good books is like conversation with the finest men of past centuries.
- Keep reading. It’s one of the most marvelous adventures that anyone can have.
- Reading is a basic tool in the living of a good life.
- I am a part of everything that I have read.
- Reading is that fruitful miracle of a communication in the midst of solitude.
- With one day’s reading a man may have the key in his hands.
- Reading well is one of the great pleasures that solitude can afford you.
- There is creative reading as well as creative writing.
- We may sit in our library and yet be in all quarters of the earth.
- How many a man has dated a new era in his life from the reading of a book.
- If a book is well written, I always find it too short.
- Just because it’s fiction doesn’t mean it’s any less true.
- When I got my library card, that was when my life began.
- The public library is where place and possibility meet.
- …the book creates meaning, the meaning creates life.
- Libraries raised me.
- People stop thinking when they cease to read.
- I read, much of the night, and go south in the winter.
- He that loves reading has everything within his reach.
- You respect books by using them, not leaving them alone.
- Be awesome! Be a book nut!
- Any book worth banning is a book worth reading.
- My education was neglected, yet I was passionately fond of reading.
- When you buy a jacket, it’s important the pockets are big enough for a paperback!
Best Reading Quotes
- Reading is the key that opens doors to many good things in life. Reading shaped my dreams, and more reading helped me make my dreams come true. Ruth Bader Ginsburg
- Do not read, as children do, to amuse yourself, or like the ambitious, for the purpose of instruction. No, read in order to live.
- Read not to contradict and confute; nor to believe and take for granted; nor to find talk and discourse; but to weigh and consider.
- Until I feared I would lose it, I never loved to read. One does not love breathing.
- The good, the admirable reader identifies himself not with the boy or the girl in the book, but with the mind that conceived and composed that book.
- Literature is the safe and traditional vehicle through which we learn about the world and pass on values from on generation to the next. Books save lives.
- Reading is at the threshold of our inner life; it can lead us into that life but cannot constitute it.
- Books are those faithful mirrors that reflect to our mind the minds of sages and heroes.
- I cannot remember the books I’ve read any more than the meals I have eaten; even so, they have made me.
- Show me a family of readers, and I will show you the people who move the world.
- If one cannot enjoy reading a book over and over again, there is no use in reading it at all.
- Man reading should be man intensely alive. The book should be a ball of light in one’s hand.
- Most of what makes a book ‘good’ is that we are reading it at the right moment for us.
- I think books are like people, in the sense that they’ll turn up in your life when you most need them.
- This week I’ve been reading a lot and doing little work. That’s the way things ought to be. That’s surely the road to success.
- I’m old-fashioned and think that reading books is the most glorious pastime that humankind has yet devised.
- More than at any other time, when I hold a beloved book in my hand my limitations fall from me, my spirit is free.
- 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.
- Literature is the art of discovering something extraordinary about ordinary people, and saying with ordinary words something extraordinary.
- Words can be like X-rays if you use them properly — they’ll go through anything. You read and you’re pierced.
- A classic is a book that has never finished saying what it has to say. The Uses of Literature
- Let us read, and let us dance; these two amusements will never do any harm to the world.
- You forget everything. The hours slip by. You travel in your chair through centuries you seem to see before you, your thoughts are caught up in the story, dallying with the details or following the course of the plot, you enter into characters, so that it seems as if it were your own heart beating beneath their costumes.
- The books that the world calls immoral are books that show the world its own shame.
- As we expand our knowledge of good books, we shrink the circle of men whose company we appreciate.
- You don’t have to burn books to destroy a culture. Just get people to stop reading them.
- Books are mirrors: you only see in them what you already have inside you.
- Employ your time in improving yourself by other men’s writings so that you shall come easily by what others have labored hard for.
- A book is a garden, an orchard, a storehouse, a party, a company by the way, a counselor, a multitude of counselors.
- No entertainment is so cheap as reading, nor any pleasure so lasting.
- I read my eyes out and can’t read half enough…the more one reads the more one sees we have to read.
- The one way of tolerating existence is to lose oneself in literature as in a perpetual orgy.
- Since we are destined to live out our lives in the prison of our minds, it is our duty to furnish it well.
- A wise reader reads the book of genius not with his heart, not so much with his brain, but with his spine. It is there that occurs the telltale tingle…
- 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.
- If you would tell me the heart of a man, tell me not what he reads, but what he rereads.
- Literature is strewn with the wreckage of those who have minded beyond reason the opinion of others.
- The worst thing about new books is that they keep us from reading the old ones.
- Great literature is simply language charged with meaning to the utmost possible degree.
- The oldest books are still only just out to those who have not read them.
- A short story is a different thing altogether – a short story is like a quick kiss in the dark from a stranger. Skeleton Crew
- Books don’t offer real escape, but they can stop a mind scratching itself raw. Cloud Atlas
- 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.
- Books are not made for furniture, but there is nothing else that so beautifully furnishes a house.
- Books are like imprisoned souls till someone takes them down from a shelf and frees them.
- If I could always read I should never feel the want of company.
- The art of reading is to skip judiciously. Alexander Hamilton
- I was raised among books, making invisible friends in pages that seemed cast from dust and whose smell I carry on my hands to this day.
- The books we read should be chosen with great care, that they may be, as an Egyptian king wrote over his library,’The medicines of the soul.
- The more that you read, the more things you will know. The more that you learn, the more places you’ll go.
Funny Reading Quotes
- ′Classic′ – a book which people praise and don’t read.
- Never trust anyone who has not brought a book with them. Horseradish
- I find television very educating. Every time somebody turns on the set, I go into the other room and read a book.
- There are worse crimes than burning books. One of them is not reading them.
- Books are finite, sexual encounters are finite, but the desire to read and to fuck is infinite; it surpasses our own deaths, our fears, our hopes for peace.
- A library is a place where you can lose your innocence without losing your virginity.
- The paperback is very interesting but I find it will never replace the hardcover book – it makes a very poor doorstop.
- People can lose their lives in libraries. They ought to be warned.
- Let’s be reasonable and add an eighth day to the week that is devoted exclusively to reading.
- Finally, from so little sleeping and so much reading, his brain dried up and he went completely out of his mind. Don Quixote
- Books are no more threatened by Kindle than stairs by elevators.
- I read in self-defense.
- Books are vital to learning. Half the population don’t go to football matches but that doesn’t make football any less important.
- Long books, when read, are usually overpraised, because the reader wishes to convince others and himself that he has not wasted his time.
- Deprived of their newspapers or a novel, reading-addicts will fall back onto cookery books, on the literature which is wrapped around bottles of patent medicine, on those instructions for keeping the contents crisp which are printed on the outside of boxes of breakfast cereals. On anything. The Olive Tree
- This will never be a civilized country until we expend more money for books than we do for chewing gum.
- For every book you buy, you should buy the time to read it.
Reading Quotes for Kids
- Reading one book is like eating one potato chip.
- Today a reader, tomorrow a leader.
- Handle a book as a bee does a flower, extract its sweetness but do not damage it. John Muir
- I know every book of mine by its smell, and I have but to put my nose between the pages to be reminded of all sorts of things.
- A children’s story that can only be enjoyed by children is not a good children’s story in the slightest.
- When I am king they shall not have bread and shelter only, but also teachings out of books, for a full belly is little worth where the mind is starved.
- 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.
- 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.
- The child intuitively comprehends that although these stories are unreal, they are not untrue … The Uses of Enchantment: The Meaning and Importance of Fairy Tales
Inspirational Reading Quotes
- Frederick Douglass taught that literacy is the path from slavery to freedom. There are many kinds of slavery and many kinds of freedom, but reading is still the path.
- Reading furnishes the mind only with materials of knowledge; it is thinking that makes what we read ours.
- Properly, we should read for power. Man reading should be man intensely alive. The book should be a ball of light in one’s hand.
- No man understands a deep book until he has seen and lived at least part of its contents.
- Books are the quietest and most constant of friends; they are the most accessible and wisest of counselors, and the most patient of teachers.
- It is what you read when you don’t have to that determines what you will be when you can’t help it.
- To acquire the habit of reading is to construct for yourself a refuge from almost all the miseries of life. Books and You
- The most essential and fundamental aspect of culture is the study of literature, since this is an education in how to picture and understand human situations.
- What we become depends on what we read after all of the professors have finished with us. The greatest university of all is a collection of books.
- 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.
- Sit in a room and read–and read and read. And read the right books by the right people. Your mind is brought onto that level, and you have a nice, mild, slow-burning rapture all the time.
- Maybe this is why we read, and why in moments of darkness we return to books: to find words for what we already know.
- The worst readers are those who behave like plundering troops: they take away a few things they can use, dirty and confound the remainder, and revile the whole.
- 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.
- I go to books and to nature as the bee goes to a flower, for a nectar that I can make into my own honey.
- Associate with the noblest people you can find; read the best books; live with the mighty; but learn to be happy alone.
- I must judge for myself, but how can I judge, how can any man judge, unless his mind has been opened and enlarged by reading.
Reading Book Quotes
- Reading… is an activity subsequent to writing: more resigned, more civil, more intellectual.
- 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.
- Come to the book as you would come to an unexplored land. Come without a map. Explore it and draw your own map. Hearts in Atlantis
- My life is a reading list.
- In the highest civilization, the book is still the highest delight. He who has once known its satisfactions is provided with a resource against calamity.
- Entering a novel is like going on a climb in the mountains: you have to learn the rhythm of respiration, acquire the pace; otherwise you stop right away.
- Reading nurtures the soul, and an enlightened friend brings it solace.
- A man ought to read just as inclination leads him; for what he reads as a task will do him little good.
- When we read too fast or too slowly, we understand nothing.
- What a melancholy day!” I said. “Aren’t you bored?”
“Not particularly. I am reading.”
Famous Reading Quotes
- Some books should be tasted, some devoured, but only a few should be chewed and digested thoroughly.
- 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.
- I kept always two books in my pocket, one to read, one to write in.
- A book read by a thousand different people is a thousand different books.
- I am an omnivorous reader with a strangely retentive memory for trifles.
- You can never get a cup of tea large enough or a book long enough to suit me.
- A fondness for reading, properly directed, must be an education in itself.
- There is no scent so pleasant to my nostrils as that faint, subtle reek which comes from an ancient book.
- 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.
- There are perhaps no days of our childhood we lived so fully as those we believe we left without having lived them, those we spent with a favorite book.
- Everywhere I have sought peace and not found it, except in a corner with a book.
- Read, read, read, read, read, read, read, read, read, read, read, read, read…if you don’t read, you will never be a filmmaker.
- Poetry is not the most important thing in life… I’d much rather lie in a hot bath reading Agatha Christie and sucking sweets.
- I really had a lot of dreams when I was a kid, and I think a great deal of that grew out of the fact that I had a chance to read a lot.
- Let others pride themselves about how many pages they have written; I’d rather boast about the ones I’ve read.
- 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.
- 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.
- A great book should leave you with many experiences, and slightly exhausted at the end. You live several lives while reading.
- You can’t consume much if you sit still and read books.
- If you don’t have time to read, you don’t have the time (or the tools) to write. Simple as that.
- No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader. No surprise in the writer, no surprise in the reader.
- 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. - I had found my religion: nothing seemed more important to me than a book. I saw the library as a temple.
- My alma mater was books, a good library…. I could spend the rest of my life reading, just satisfying my curiosity.
- 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.
- Read. Read. Read. Just don’t read one type of book. Read different books by various authors so that you develop different style.
- Sometimes I think heaven must be one continuous unexhausted reading.
- Idleness is the enemy of the soul; and therefore the brethren ought to be employed in manual labor at certain times, at others, in devout reading. Saint
- Reading, after a certain age, diverts the mind too much from its creative pursuits. Any man who reads too much and uses his own brain too little falls into lazy habits of thinking.
- Don’t join the book burners. Don’t think you’re going to conceal faults by concealing evidence that they ever existed. Don’t be afraid to go in your library and read every book…
- Once you learn to read, you’ll be forever free. Frederick Douglass
Long Reading Quotes
- 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.
- When evening comes, I return home and go into my study. On the threshold I strip off my muddy, sweaty, workday clothes, and put on the robes of court and palace, and in this graver dress I enter the antique courts of the ancients and am welcomed by them, and there I taste the food that alone is mine, and for which I was born. And there I make bold to speak to them and ask the motives of their actions, and they, in their humanity, reply to me. And for the space of four hours I forget the world, remember no vexation, fear poverty no more, tremble no more at death: I pass indeed into their world.
- We would be worse than we are without the good books we have read, more conformist, not as restless, more submissive, and the critical spirit, the engine of progress, would not even exist. Like writing, reading is a protest against the insufficiencies of life. When we look in fiction for what is missing in life, we are saying, with no need to say it or even to know it, that life as it is does not satisfy our thirst for the absolute – the foundation of the human condition – and should be better. We invent fictions in order to live somehow the many lives we would like to lead when we barely have one at our disposal.
- A book is more than a verbal structure or series of verbal structures; it is the dialogue it establishes with its reader and the intonation it imposes upon his voice and the changing and durable images it leaves in his memory. A book is not an isolated being: it is a relationship, an axis of innumerable relationships.
- In reading, friendship is restored immediately to its original purity. With books there is no forced sociability. If we pass the evening with those friends—books—it’s because we really want to. When we leave them, we do so with regret and, when we have left them, there are none of those thoughts that spoil friendship: “What did they think of us?”—“Did we make a mistake and say something tactless?”—“Did they like us?”—nor is there the anxiety of being forgotten because of displacement by someone else. All such agitating thoughts expire as we enter the pure and calm friendship of reading.
- When the Day of Judgment dawns and people, great and small, come marching in to receive their heavenly rewards, the Almighty will gaze upon the mere bookworms and say to Peter, “Look, these need no reward. We have nothing to give them. They have loved reading.
- When we read, another person thinks for us: we merely repeat his mental process. In learning to write, the pupil goes over with his pen what the teacher has outlined in pencil: so in reading; the greater part of the work of thought is already done for us. This is why it relieves us to take up a book after being occupied with our own thoughts. And in reading, the mind is, in fact, only the playground of another’s thoughts. So it comes about that if anyone spends almost the whole day in reading, and by way of relaxation devotes the intervals to some thoughtless pastime, he gradually loses the capacity for thinking; just as the man who always rides, at last forgets how to walk. This is the case with many learned persons: they have read themselves stupid. A
- “A man eager to climb famous mountains must have the patience to follow a winding path. A man eager to eat bear’s paw must have the patience to simmer it slowly. A man eager to watch the moonlight must have the patience to wait until midnight. A man eager to see a beautiful woman must have the patience to let her finish her toilette. Reading requires patience too.
- 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.
- 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. Journey to the Center of the Earth
- And when I read, and really I do not read so much, only a few authors, – a few men that I discovered by accident – I do this because they look at things in a broader, milder and more affectionate way than I do, and because they know life better, so that I can learn from them. The Letters of Vincent van Gogh
Poetic Quotes About Reading
- Me, poor man, my library
Was dukedom large enough.
The Tempest - I have good reason to be content,
for thank God I can read and
perhaps understand Shakespeare to his depths. - Dreams, books, are each a world; and books, we know,
Are a substantial world, both pure and good:
Round these, with tendrils strong as flesh and blood,
Our pastime and our happiness will grow. - Books are the bees which carry the quickening pollen from one to another mind.
- Keep reminding yourself that literature is one of the saddest roads that leads to everything.
- When writers die they become books, which is, after all, not too bad an incarnation.
- There is no Frigate like a Book
To take us Lands away
Nor any Coursers like a Page
Of prancing Poetry –
This Traverse may the poorest take
Without oppress of Toll –
How frugal is the Chariot
That bears a Human soul.
Reading Quotes On Images
You May Also Like:
Steps Towards Freedom | 86 Adventurous Walking Quotes
100+ Ernest Hemingway Quotes That Can Transform Your Life Perspective
A World Without Bias | 175 Truth Quotes
Never Lose Heart, Always Have Hope | 199 Encouraging Quotes