Love books as much as I do? These inspiring quotes about books and reading will make you want to grab your favorite book and stay a while.
Books and I have been in love forever.
I read, collect, hoard, and hold on to them like little treasures.
Whenever I see a bookstore, big and buzzing or small and tucked away in a quiet corner, it makes me happy.
Once, in an old second-hand bookstore, the owner smiled and said, “Every book here has a story of its own, even before you open it.” My heart melted right then. How could anyone not fall for that?
And libraries? They’re pure magic. Put me in one, and I lose all sense of time. The world outside just disappears.
I once promised myself I’d “just browse for an hour” in a grand old library during a trip. Four hours later, my family had to drag me out while I insisted I’d only just started.
Talking about online book shopping, that’s a whole new addiction.
I load up my cart like I’m preparing for an apocalypse, where books will be the only thing that saves us.
I’ve even self-diagnosed my condition: bibliomania.
There’s a beautiful Japanese word for it: tsundoku, the art of buying books, hoarding them, and sometimes not even having the time to read them.
My shelves might overflow, and my reading pile might look like a Jenga game about to collapse, but I still want them all in my library.
And you know what?
Just having them makes me happy.
An unread book today is like a friend waiting for the right moment to step in.
If you’ve read my About Me page, you’ll know hoarding isn’t limited to books.
I collect quotes, phrases, and beautiful words like treasures washed ashore.
A scrap of wisdom here, a poetic line there, they all hold meaning, waiting for the right day to shine.
I guess you could say I’m a hoarder of stories, the ones we read, the ones we live, and the ones we pass on.
And yes, I’m that person who’ll stop mid-sentence to inhale the smell of a book.
There’s nothing like the scent of old paper: warm, nostalgic, like flipping through time itself.
Sure, I read on a Kindle now and then (convenience, right?), but nothing beats the weight of a book in your hands.
That satisfying whoosh when you turn the page, the way the spine creaks like it’s stretching awake, the notes scribbled in the margins by someone else who loved the book before you.
Pair all that with a warm cup of tea or coffee, and you’ve got yourself the perfect escape, books and brews, a match made in literary heaven.
I’m happy this love of books has passed on to my mini-me, a proud parenting moment if ever there was one.
Watching her get lost in a book, eyes sparkling with curiosity, feels like the passing of a baton.
Even Denmark, the happiest country in the world, swears by this idea.
Their hygge philosophy holds that a house becomes a home when it includes books, cozy nooks, plants, and warm lighting.
And I couldn’t agree more.
Books fill homes not just with stories but with soul.
For fellow bookworms, these quotes about books and reading are for us, the ones who’ve been late to dinner because “just one more chapter,” the ones who rearrange their bookshelves for fun, the ones who believe every book holds a promise.
Whether your heart belongs to poetry, self-help, fantasy, or the lives of extraordinary people, these bibliophile quotes will remind you why we adore these magical little portals to other worlds.
Here’s to books, thefriends who never let us down, warm cups of tea or coffee, and the adventures that never end.
Book Lover Quotes for Those Who Live Between the Pages
Ah, how good it is to be among people who are reading. ~ Rainer Maria Rilke
So many books, so little time. ~ Frank Zappa
Where is human nature so weak as in the bookstore? ~ Henry Ward Beecher
And books, they offer one hope — that a whole universe might open up from between the covers, and falling into that universe, one is saved. ~ Anne Rice
One kind of good book should leave you asking: how did the author know that about me? ~ Alain de Botton
People say that life is the thing, but I prefer reading. ~ Logan Pearsall Smith
No two persons ever read the same book. ~ Edmund Wilson
The person who deserves most pity is a lonesome one on a rainy day who doesn’t know how to read. ~ Benjamin Franklin
I was raised by books. Books, and then my parents. ~ Elon Musk
When I think of all the books still left for me to read, I am certain of further happiness. ~ Jules Renard
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. ~ Carlos Ruiz Zafón
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
Let’s be reasonable and add an eighth day to the week that is devoted exclusively to reading. ~ Lena Dunham
The world was hers for the reading. ~ Betty Smith
When writers die they become books, which is, after all, not too bad an incarnation. ~ Jorge Luis Borges
It is thanks to my evening reading alone that I am still more of less sane. ~ W.G. Sebald
I water my mind with books. ~ Susan Sontag
I was with book, as a woman is with child. ~ C.S. Lewis
I can feel infinitely alive curled up on the sofa reading a book. ~ Benedict Cumberbatch
Books don’t change people; paragraphs do, sometimes even sentences. ~ John Piper
I love the smell of book ink in the morning. ~ Umberto Eco
Beware of the person of one book. ~ Thomas Aquinas
I cannot remember a time when I was not in love with them – with the books themselves, cover and binding and the paper they were printed on, with their smell and their weight and with their possession in my arms, captured and carried off to myself. ~ Eudora Welty
I would rather read the 100 best books over and over again until I absorbed them, rather than read all the books. ~ Naval Ravikant
How do I live in this world in which I cannot read all the books or have all the dogs? ~ Glennon Doyle
There’s nothing wrong with reading a book you love over and over. When you do, the words get inside you, become a part of you, in a way that words in a book you’ve read only once can’t. ~ Gail Carson Levine
Words can be like X-rays if you use them properly – they’ll go through anything. You read and you’re pierced. ~ Aldous Huxley
Books belong to their readers now, which is a great thing–because the books are more powerful in the hands of my readers than they could ever be in my hands. ~ John Green
But luxury has never appealed to me, I like simple things, books, being alone, or with somebody who understands. ~ Daphne du Maurier
A book a day keeps reality away. ~ Unknown
I’ll read my books and I’ll drink coffee and I’ll listen to music and I’ll bolt the door. ~ J.D. Salinger
Books are absent teachers. ~ Mortimer J. Adler
Few pleasures, for the true reader, rival the pleasure of browsing unhurriedly among books: old books, new books, library books, other people’s books, one’s own books – it does not matter whose or where. Simply to be among books, glancing at one here, reading a page from one over there, enjoying them all as objects to be touched, looked at, even smelt, is a deep satisfaction. And often, very often, while browsing haphazardly, looking for nothing in particular, you pick up a volume that suddenly excites you, and you know that this one of all the others you must read. Those are great moments – and the books we come across like that are often the most memorable. ~ Aidan Chambers
If you only read the books that everyone else is reading, you can only think what everyone else is thinking. ~ Haruki Murakami
People who ask for book recommendations don’t read. ~ Sahil Lavingia
Eating and reading are two pleasures that combine admirably. ~ C. S. Lewis
Have books ‘happened’ to you? Unless your answer to that question is ‘yes,’ I’m unsure how to talk to you. ~ Haruki Murakami
When I am dead, I hope it may be said: His sins were scarlet, but his books were read. ~ Hilaire Belloc
Books are the flung-open windows to a parallel universe. ~ Kevin Ansbro
But for my own part, if a book is well written, I always find it too short. ~ Jane Austen
Book love is something like romantic love. When we are reading a really great book, burdens feel lighter, cares seem smaller, and commonplaces are suddenly delightful. You become your best optimistic self. Like romantic love, book love fills you with a certain warmth and completeness. The world holds promise. ~ Steve Leveen
We live for books. ~ Umberto Eco
A word after a word after a word is power. ~ Margaret Atwood
Among the many worlds which man did not receive as a gift of nature, but which he created with his own mind, the world of books is the greatest. ~ Hermann Hesse
Without words, without writing, and without books there would be no history, there could be no concept of humanity. ~ Hermann Hesse
In the end, we’ll all become stories. ~ Margaret Atwood
Many people, myself among them, feel better at the mere sight of a book. ~ Jane Smiley
When I had nothing, I had books. ~ Jola Tankoka
Some like to believe it’s the book that chooses the person. ~ Carlos Ruiz Zafón
A good reader, a major reader, an active and creative reader is a rereader. ~ Vladimir Nabokov
It’s never taken effort—that’s what made me fall in love with reading.: the instant floating sensation, the dissolution of real-world problems, every worry suddenly safely on the other side of some metaphysical surface. ~ Emily Henry
With freedom, books, flowers, and the moon, who could not be happy? ~ Oscar Wilde
If you don’t see the book you want on the shelf, write it. ~ Beverly Cleary
What a blessing it is to love books. ~ Elizabeth von Arnim
Read more books and fewer articles. ~ Morgan Housel
Let just as many books be acquired as are enough, but none for mere show. ~ Seneca
I am a part of everything I have read. ~ Theodore Roosevelt
For one thing, I know every book of mine by its scent.
That I can read and be happy while I am reading, is a great blessing. ~ Anthony Trollope
What on earth could be more luxurious than a sofa, a book, and a cup of coffee?…Was ever anything so civil? ~ Anthony Trollope
She read books as one would breathe air, to fill up and live. ~ Annie Dillard
It’s always a good day to read a book. ~ Unknown
There comes a time when you have to choose between turning the page and closing the book.
One must always be careful of books and what’s inside them for words have power to change us. ~ Cassandra Clare
Book lovers never go to bed alone.
I read past my bedtime. ~ Unknown
Sleep is good. Books are better. ~ George R. R. Martin
Sometimes, even when you start with the last page and you think you know everything, a book finds a way to surprise you. ~ Emily Henry
The only important thing in a book is the meaning that it has for you. ~ W. Somerset Maugham
I was a book lover from the beginning. I loved, love, words and images and ideas, the ways a book can make you feel things deeply or help you understand something you never even knew there were words for. ~ Deb Caletti
I am a book lover. I buy, collect, and read books. ~ Lailah Gifty Akita
Of all that is written, I love only what a man has written with his own blood. ~ Friedrich Nietzsche
It is a great thing to start life with a small number of really good books which are your very own. ~ Sherlock Holmes
Happiness. That’s what books smell like. Happiness. That’s why I always wanted to have a book shop. What better life than to trade in happiness? ~ Saran MacLean
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. ~ George Gissing
Book lovers will understand me, and they will know too that part of the pleasure of a library lies in its very existence. ~ Jan Morris
The very existence of libraries affords the best evidence that we may yet have hope for the future of man ~ T.S. Eliot
Collect books, even if you don’t plan on reading them right away. Nothing is more important than an unread library. ~ John Waters
When I have a little money, I buy books; and if I have any left, I buy food and clothes. ~ Desiderius Erasmus Roterodamus
Make your own Bible. Select and collect all the words and sentences that in all your readings have been to you like the blast of a trumpet. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson
Just the knowledge that a good book is waiting for one at the end of a long day makes the day happier. ~ Kathleen Norris
Everywhere I have sought peace and not found it, except in a corner with a book. ~ Thomas a Kempis
Quotes About Reading That Celebrate the Joy of Stories
The more one reads, the less one imitates. ~ Jules Renard
I declare after all there is no enjoyment like reading. ~ Jane Austen
If you are too busy to read, you are too busy. ~ Richard Foster
Reading is where the wild things are. ~ Jeanette Winterson
I’m old-fashioned and think that reading books is the most glorious pastime that humankind has yet devised. ~ Wislawa Szymborska
The only advice, indeed, that one person can give another about reading is to take no advice, to follow your own instincts, to use your own reason, to come to your own conclusions. ~ Virginia Woolf
Reading is dreaming with open eyes.
Every man who knows how to read has it in his power to magnify himself, to multiply the ways in which he exists, to make his life full, significant, and interesting. ~ Aldous Huxley
To learn to read is to light a fire; every syllable that is spelled out is a spark. ~ Victor Hugo
At one magical instant in your early childhood, the page of a book—that string of confused, alien ciphers—shivered into meaning. Words spoke to you, gave up their secrets; at that moment, whole universes opened. You became, irrevocably, a reader. ~ Alberto Manguel
The whole world opened to me when I learned to read. ~ Mary McLeod Bethune
Reading is essential for those who seek to rise about the ordinary. ~ Jim Rohn
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. ~ Gustave Flaubert
Reading is a means of thinking with another person’s mind; it forces you to stretch your own. ~ Charles Scribner Jr.
A love of reading shows empathy, the desire to understand how others live or act or might act—and why. ~ Celeste Ng
Either write something worth reading or do something worth writing. ~ Benjamin Franklin
You are a reader, and therefore a thinker, an observer, a living soul who wants more out of this human experience. ~ Salil Jha
Because when I read, I don’t really read; I pop a beautiful sentence into my mouth and suck it like a fruit drop, or I sip it like a liqueur until the thought dissolves in me like alcohol, infusing brain and heart and coursing on through the veins to the root of each blood vessel. ~ Bohumil Hrabal
Some people will lie, cheat, steal and back-stab to to get ahead…and to think, all they have to do is READ! ~ Fortune
Reading is to the mind what exercise is to the body. ~ Joseph Addison
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… ~ Vladimir Nabokov
I read a book one day and my whole life was changed. ~ Orhan Pamuk
Life happened because I turned the pages. ~ Alberto Manguel
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. ~ John Adams
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. ~ John Burroughs
The ability to read awoke inside of me some long dormant craving to be mentally alive. ~ Malcolm X
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
Once you’ve read a book you care about, some part of it is always with you. ~ Louis L’Amour
I take a book with me everywhere I go, and find there are all sorts of opportunities to dip in. The trick is to teach yourself to read in small sips as well as in long swallows. ~ Stephen King
Reading is a discount ticket to everywhere. ~ Mary Schmich
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
Think before you speak. Read before you think. ~ Fran Lebowitz
To acquire the habit of reading is to construct for yourself a refuge from almost all the miseries of life. ~ W. Somerset Maugham
Insensibly he formed the most delightful habit in the world, the habit of reading: he did not know that thus he was providing himself with a refuge from all the distress of life; he did not know either that he was creating for himself an unreal world which would make the real world of every day a source of bitter disappointment. ~ W. Somerset Maugham
Reading forces you to be quiet in a world that no longer makes place for that. ~ John Green
He liked the mere act of reading, the magic of turning scratches on a page into words inside his head. ~ John Green
To feel most beautifully alive means to be reading something beautiful, ready always to apprehend in the flow of language the sudden flash of poetry. ~ Gaston Bachelard
No. I can survive well enough on my own — if given the proper reading material. ~ Sarah J. Maas
If you would tell me the heart of a man, tell me not what he reads, but what he rereads. ~ Francois Mauriac
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
Once I began to read, I began to exist. I am what I read. ~ Walter Dean Myers
Reading is that fruitful miracle of a communication in the midst of solitude. ~ Marcel Proust
Reading gives us someplace to go when we have to stay where we are. ~ Mason Cooley
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
Once you learn to read you will be forever free. ~ Frederick Douglass
You see, unlike in the movies, there is no THE END sign flashing at the end of books. When I’ve read a book, I don’t feel like I’ve finished anything. So I start a new one. ~ Elif Shafak
Reading one book is like eating one potato chip. ~ Diane Duane
The best advice I ever got was that knowledge is power and to keep reading. ~ David Bailey
Reading makes immigrants of us all. It takes us away from home, but more important, it finds homes for us everywhere. ~ Jean Rhys
Keep reading. It’s one of the most marvelous adventures anyone can have. ~ Llyod Alexander
It’s a particular kind of pleasure, of intimacy, loving a book with someone. ~ Lily King
The art of not reading is a very important one. It consists in not taking an interest in whatever may be engaging the attention of the general public at any particular time. When some political or ecclesiastical pamphlet, or novel, or poem is making a great commotion, you should remember that he who writes for fools always finds a large public. A precondition for reading good books is not reading bad ones: for life is short. ~ Arthur Schopenhauer
All the reading she had done had given her a view of life they had never seen. ~ Roald Dahl
So Matilda’s strong young mind continued to grow, nurtured by the voices of all the 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
Even bad books are books and therefore sacred. ~ Günter Grass
The books transported her into new worlds and introduced her to amazing people who lived exciting lives. She went on olden-day sailing ships with Joseph Conrad. She went to Africa with Ernest Hemingway and to India with Rudyard Kipling. She travelled all over the world while sitting in her little room in an English village. ~ Roald Dahl
If we encounter a man of rare intellect, we should ask him what books he reads. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson
I love the solitude of reading. I love the deep dive into someone else’s story, the delicious ache of a last page. ~ Naomi Shihab Nye
When you read a great book, you don’t escape from life, you plunge deeper into it. There may be a superficial escape – into different countries, mores, speech patterns – but what you are essentially doing is furthering your understanding of life’s subtleties, paradoxes, joys, pains and truths. Reading and life are not separate but symbiotic. ~ Julian Barnes
Reading is a basic tool in the living of a good life. ~ Joseph Addison
Read, every day, something no one else is reading. Think, every day, something no one else is thinking. Do, every day, something no one else would be silly enough to do. It is bad for the mind to be always part of unanimity. ~ Christopher Morley
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
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 is a conversation. All books talk. But a good book listens as well. ~ Mark Haddon
Don’t ask me who’s influenced me. A lion is made up of all the lambs he’s digested, and I’ve been reading all my life. ~ Giorgos Seferis
Reading without reflecting is like eating without digesting. ~ Edmund Burke
I don’t read a book; I hold a conversation with the author. ~ Elbert Hubbard
Stories are illusion. They are so powerful they invite delusion. ~ Stewart Brand
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
Until I feared I would lose it, I never loved to read. One does not love breathing. ~ Harper Lee
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
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
A writer only begins a book. A reader finishes it. ~ Samuel Johnson
Reading is an active, imaginative act; it takes work. ~ Khaled Hosseini
No matter how busy you may think you are, you must find time for reading, or surrender yourself to self-chosen ignorance. ~ Confucius
Reading is an exercise in empathy; an exercise in walking in someone else’s shoes for a while. ~ Malorie Blackman
Readers are plentiful, thinkers are rare. ~ Harriet Martineau
It is known that reading quickens the growth of a heart like nothing else. ~ Catherynne M. Valente
Anyone who reads a book with a sense of obligation does not understand the art of reading. ~ Lin Yutang
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 well-read woman is a dangerous creature. ~ Lisa Kleypas
I have never known any distress that an hour’s reading did not relieve. ~ Montesquieu
A reader lives a thousand lives before he dies. ~ George R. R. Martin
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 world belongs to those who read. ~ Rick Holland
A half-read book is a half-finished love affair. ~ David Mitchell
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
What I love the most about reading: It gives you the ability to reach higher ground. And keep climbing. ~ Oprah Winfrey
Reading to children even before they can understand, teaches them to associate books with love and affection. ~ Unknown
I believe that children in this country need a more robust literary diet than they are getting. …It does not hurt them to read about good and evil, love and hate, life and death. Nor do I think they should read only about things that they understand. ‘…a man’s reach should exceed his grasp.’ So should a child’s. For myself, I will never talk down to, or draw down to, children. ~ Barbara Cooney
A child who carries a book with a bookmark in it is in two places at the same time. ~ Tony Abbott
So it is with children who learn to read fluently and well: They begin to take flight into whole new worlds as effortlessly as young birds take to the sky. ~ William James
There is no substitute for books in the life of a child. ~ Mary Ellen Chase
There are many little ways to enlarge your child’s world. Love of books is the best of all. ~ Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis
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
If we could follow the slogan that says,”Turn off the TV and open a good book” we would do something of substance for a future generation. ~ Gordon B. Hinckley
Reading should not be presented to children as a chore, a duty. It should be offered as a gift. ~ Kate DiCamillo
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
Today a reader, tomorrow a leader. ~ Margaret Fuller
The greatest gift is the passion for reading.
It is cheap, it consoles, it distracts, it excites,
it gives you knowledge of the world and experience of a wide kind.
It is a moral illumination. ~ Elizabeth Hardwick
Show me a family of readers, and I will show you the people who move the world. ~ Napoleon Bonaparte
Censoring books that deal with difficult, adolescent issues does not protect anybody. Quite the opposite. It leaves kids in the darkness and makes them vulnerable. Censorship is the child of fear and the father of ignorance. Our children cannot afford to have the truth of the world withheld from them. ~ Laurie Halse Anderson
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. Only if we face these open wounds in ourselves can we understand them in other people. ~ James Baldwin
Whenever you read a good book, somewhere in the world a door opens to allow in more light. ~ Vera Nazarian
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
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
We read in bed because reading is halfway between life and dreaming, our own consciousness in someone else’s mind. ~ Anna Quindlen
There are no faster or firmer friendships than those formed between people who love the same books. ~ Irving Stone
Reading good books is like engaging in conversation with the most cultivated minds of past centuries who had composed them, or rather, taking part in a well-conducted dialogue in which such minds reveal to us only the best of their thoughts. ~ René Descartes
Quotes About Books That Will Warm Every Reader’s Heart
There is only one thing that can replace a book: the next book. ~ Piotr Kowalczyk
There are books so alive that you’re always afraid that while you weren’t reading, the book has gone and changed, has shifted like a river; while you went on living, it went on living too, and like a river moved on and moved away. No one has stepped twice into the same river. But did anyone ever step twice into the same book? ~ Marina Tsvetaeva
A book is proof that humans are capable of working magic. ~ Carl Sagan
The failure to read good books both enfeebles the vision and strengthens our most fatal tendency — the belief that the here and now is all there is. ~ Allan Bloom,
Books are the bees which carry the quickening pollen from one to another mind. ~ James Russell Lowel
When a reader falls in love with a book, it leaves its essence inside him, like radioactive fallout in an arable field, and after that there are certain crops that will no longer grow in him, while other, stranger, more fantastic growths may occasionally be produced ~ Salman Rushdie
The books that help you most are those which make you think the most. The hardest way of learning is that of easy reading; but a great book that comes from a great thinker is a ship of thought, deep freighted with truth and beauty. ~ Pablo Neruda
I disappeared into books when I was young, disappeared into them like someone running into the woods. ~ Rebecca Solnit
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. ~ Marcel Proust
Some books are so familiar that reading them is like being home again. ~ Louisa May Alcott
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. ~ Jorge Luis Borges
The proper study of mankind is books. ~ Aldous Huxley
It was books that made me feel that perhaps I was not completely alone. They could be honest with me, and I with them. ~ Cassandra Clare
Books may not change our suffering, books may not protect us from evil, books may not tell us what is good or what is beautiful, and they will certainly not shield us from the common fate of the grave. But books grant us myriad possibilities: the possibility of change, the possibility of illumination. ~ Alberto Manguel
Books are like rivers, meandering this way and that, but taking us on a steady, flowing course to somewhere different. ~ Carla H. Krueger
She wondered whether the books she loved consoled her precisely because they were the manifestations of their own isolation. ~ Rachel Cusk
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
The magic is only in what books say, how they stitched the patches of the universe together into one garment for us. ~ Ray Bradbury
Books are the best means – private, discreet, reliable – of overcoming reality. ~ Jhumpa Lahiri
There is no scent so pleasant to my nostrils as that faint, subtle reek which comes from an ancient book. ~ Arthur Conan Doyle
The best books…are those that tell you what you know already. ~ George Orwell
We are always looking for the book it is necessary to read next. ~ Saul Bellow
The problem with books is that they end. ~ Caroline Kepnes
Life-transforming ideas have always come to me through books. ~ Bell Hooks
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
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
Books are funny little portable pieces of thought. ~ Susan Sontag
The best books cause us to dream. ~ Rikki Ducornet
I think books are like people, in the sense that they’ll turn up in your life when you most need them. ~ Emma Thompson
Look for it only in books, for it is no more than a dream remembered. ~ Sidney Howard
Books don’t offer real escape, but they can stop a mind scratching itself raw. ~ David Mitchell
I’m always amazed at how books find us at the time we need them, as if there’s some omniscient, benevolent librarian in the sky. ~ Eve Babitz
A good book is a creator of inwardness. ~ Susan Sontag
The power of a book lies in its power to turn a solitary act into a shared vision. As long as we have books, we are not alone. ~ Laura Bush
Books and doors are the same thing. You open them, and you go through into another world. ~ Jeanette Winterson
Books, for me, are a home. Books don’t make a home–they are one, in the sense that just as you do with a door, you open a book, and you go inside. Inside there is a different kind of time and a different kind of space. ~ Jeanette Winterson
A book is a door, you know. Always and forever. A book is a door into another place and another heart and another world. ~ Catheryne M. Valente
Be as careful of the books you read, as of the company you keep; for your habits and character will be as much influenced by the former as the latter. ~ Paxton Hood
Good books don’t give up all their secrets at once. ~ Stephen King
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
Great books teach you something every time you read them. ~ Angela Jiang
Books are like imprisoned souls till someone takes them down from a shelf and frees them. ~ Samuel Butler
Books are gateways to other worlds; writing is a map to the undiscovered. ~ Lauren Gano
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
The greatest books have more insights than one can absorb in a single reading. ~ James Pierce
A book, too, can be a star, a living fire to lighten the darkness, leading out into the expanding universe. ~ Madeleine L’Engle
You can never get a cup of tea large enough or a book long enough to suit me. C. S. Lewis
There is no friend as loyal as a book. ~ Ernest Hemingway
Books have a unique way of stopping time in a particular moment and saying: Let’s not forget this. ~ Dave Eggers
Books are mirrors: You only see in them what you already have inside you. ~ Carlos Ruiz Zafón
Books are like mirrors: if a fool looks in, you cannot expect a genius to look out. ~ J. K. Rowling
Think how quiet a book is on a shelf, he said, just sitting there, unopened. Then think what happens when you open it. ~ Ali Smith
As a rule the purchase of books is mistaken for the appropriation of their contents. ~ Arthur Schopenhauer
Books are not made for furniture, but there is nothing else that so beautifully furnishes a house. ~ Henry Ward Beecher
No furniture is so charming as books. ~ Sydney Smith
Many a book is like a key to unknown chambers within the castle of one’s own self. ~ Franz Kafka
Books are the training weights of the mind. ~ Epictetus
Your brain is a muscle and books are the weights. ~ James Clea
In the case of good books, the point is not to see how many of them you can get through, but how many can get through to you. ~ Mortimer Adler
Some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested; that is, some books are to be read only in parts; others to be read, but not curiously; and some few are to be read wholly, and with diligence and attention. ~ Francis Bacon,
Books, I found, had the power to make time stand still, retreat or fly into the future. ~ Jim Bishop
A book is a dream that you hold in your hand. ~ Neil Gaiman
A great book should leave you with many experiences, and slightly exhausted. You should live several lives while reading it. ~ William Styron
A mind needs books as a sword needs a whetstone, if it is to keep its edge. ~ George R.R. Martin
A room without books is like a body without a soul. ~ Marcus Tullius Cicero
A house is no home unless it contains food and fire for the mind as well as for the body. ~ Margaret Fuller
We’ve already discovered teleportation and time travel: a good book. ~ Sahil Lavingia
My favorite place to be is between the pages of my favourite book. ~ Unknown
That is a good book it seems to me, which is opened with expectation and closed with profit.~ Louisa May Alcott
Books may well be the only true magic. ~ Alice Hoffman
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
Books are lighthouses erected in the great sea of time. ~ Edwin Percy Whipple
A book is a collaboration between the one who reads and what is read and, at its best, that coming together is a love story like any other. ~ Siri Hustvedt
Any book not worth rereading isn’t worth reading. ~ Nassim Nicholas Taleb
A good book, he had concluded, leaves you wanting to reread the book. A great book compels you to reread your own soul. ~ Richard Flanagan
There is no mistaking a real book when one meets it. It is like falling in love. ~ Christopher Morley
A book is an arrangement of twenty-six phonetic symbols, ten numerals, and about eight punctuation marks, and people can cast their eyes over these and envision the eruption of Mount Vesuvius or the Battle of Waterloo. ~ Kurt Vonnegut
When you sell a man a book you don’t sell him just twelve ounces of paper and ink and glue—you sell him a whole new life. Love and friendship and humour and ships at sea by night—there’s all heaven and earth in a book, a real book I mean. ~ Christopher Morley
There is more treasure in books than in all the pirate’s loot on Treasure Island…and best of all, you can enjoy these riches every day of your life. ~ Walt Disney
Books are the carriers of civilization. Without books, history is silent, literature dumb, science crippled, thought and speculation at a standstill. ~ Barbara W. Tuchman
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
I do believe something very magical can happen when you read a good book. ~ J. K. Rowling
Books let us into their souls and lay open to us the secrets of our own. ~ William Hazlitt
Books are the plane, and the train, and the road. They are the destination, and the journey. They are home. ~ Anna Quindlen
In books I have traveled, not only to other worlds, but into my own. ~ Anna Quindlen
A book is a gift you can open again and again. ~ Garrison Keillor
A book worth reading is worth buying. ~ John Ruskin
Books are the lives we don’t have time to live.
A good book is an event in my life. ~ Stendhal
Most of what makes a book ‘good’ is that we are reading it at the right moment for us. ~ Alain de Botton
Books are uniquely portable magic. ~ Stepehen King
Some books leave us free and some books make us free. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson
Books can be dangerous. The best ones should be labeled ‘This could change your life.’ ~ Helen Exley
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
Good friends, good books, and a sleepy conscience: this is the ideal life. ~ Mark Twain
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
I look at books as being a form of activism. Sometimes they’ll show us a side of the world that we might not have known about. ~ Angie Thomas
Books are safer than other people anyway. ~ Neil Gaiman
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
That’s the thing about books. They let you travel without moving your feet. ~ Jhumpa Lahiri
Buying books would be a good thing if one could also buy the time to read them in. ~ Arthur Schopenhauer
The book is a film that takes place in the mind of the reader. That’s why we go to movies and say,”Oh, the book is better.” ~ Paulo Coelho
Books are the compasses and telescopes and sextants and charts which other men have prepared to help us navigate the dangerous seas of human life. ~ Jesse Lee Bennett
Some More Quotes About Books and Reading to Inspire Your Love for Stories & Beyond
After nourishment, shelter and companionship, stories are the thing we need most in the world. ~ Philip Pullman
Hold a book in your hand and you’re a pilgrim at the gates of a new city. ~ Anne Michaels
The dearest ones of time, the strongest friends of the soul – books. ~ Emily Dickinson
The first thing that reading teaches us is how to be alone. ~ Jonathan Franzen
I had found my religion: nothing seemed more important to me than a book. I saw the library as a temple. ~ Jean-Paul Sartre
If you don’t like to read, you haven’t found the right book. ~ J. K. Rowling
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
A book is a garden, an orchard, a storehouse, a party, a company by the way, a counselor, a multitude of counselors. ~ Charles Baudelaire
The poet lights the light and fades away. But the light goes on and on. ~ Emily Dickinson
When I have a house of my own, I shall be miserable if I have not an excellent library. ~ Jane Austen
Successful people have libraries. The rest have big screen TVs. ~ Jim Rohn
I suspect it may be like the difference between a drinker and an alcoholic; the one merely reads books, the other needs books to make it through the day. ~ Gail Carriger
If your library is not “unsafe,” it probably isn’t doing its job. ~ John Berry
My library is an archive of longings. ~ Susan Sontag
Libraries will get you through times of no money better than money will get you through times of no libraries. ~ Anne Herbert
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
The only thing that you absolutely have to know is the location of the library. ~ Alber Einstein
In principle and reality, libraries are life-enhancing palaces of wonder. ~ Gail Honeyman
′Classic′ – a book which people praise and don’t read. ~ Mark Twain
A classic is a book that has never finished saying what it has to say. ~ Italo Calvino
It is the nature of those books we call classics to wait patiently on the shelf for us to grow into them. ~ Erica Jong
The reading of all good books is like a conversation with the finest minds of past centuries. ~ Rene Descartes
No entertainment is so cheap as reading, nor any pleasure so lasting. She will not want new fashions nor regret the loss of expensive diversions or variety of company if she can be amused with an author in her closet. ~ Mary Wortley Montagu
The very greatest books only manage to illuminate the dark confusion of our lives like a brief brilliant firework. ~ Alain de Botton
In a good book the best is between the lines. ~ Swedish proverb
I am an omnivorous reader with a strangely retentive memory for trifles. ~ Arthur Conan Doyle
I love the way that each book — any book — is its own journey. You open it, and off you go… ~ Sharon Creech
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
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 was made for the library, not the classroom. The classroom was the jail of other people’s interests. The library was open, unending, free. ~ Ta-Nehisi Coates
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
If you have a garden and a library, you have everything you need. ~ Marcus Tullius Cicero
There’s always room for a story that can transport people to another place. ~ J. K. Rowling
A good [short story] would take me out of myself and then stuff me back in, outsized, now, and uneasy with the fit. ~ David Sedaris
So I kept reading, just to stay alive. In fact, I’d read two or three books at the same time, so I wouldn’t finish one without being in the middle of another — anything to stop me from falling into the big, gaping void. You see, books fill the empty spaces. If I’m waiting for a bus, or am eating alone, I can always rely on a book to keep me company. Sometimes I think I like them even more than people. People will let you down in life. They’ll disappoint you and hurt you and betray you. But not books. They’re better than life. ~ Marc Acito
I’m tired of hearing people say they don’t have time to read. I don’t have time for anything else! ~ George Witman
I believe that today more than ever a book should be sought after even if it has only one great page in it. We must search for fragments, splinters, toenails, anything that is capable of resuscitating the body and the soul. ~ Henry Miller
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 Wolf
Extremists have shown what frightens them most: a girl with a book. ~ Malala Yousafzai
A children’s story that can only be enjoyed by children is not a good children’s story in the slightest. ~ C.S. Lewis
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
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
Each time you read a book, a tree smiles knowing there’s life after death. ~ Tumblr
When at last I came upon the right book, the feeling was violent: it blew open a hole in me that made life more dangerous because I couldn’t control what came through it. ~ Nicole Kraus
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
If there’s a book that you want to read, but it hasn’t been written yet, then you must write it. ~ Toni Morrison
There are two motives for reading a book: one, that you enjoy it; the other, that you can boast about it. ~ Bertrand Russell
The books that the world calls immoral are books that show the world its own shame. ~ Oscar Wilde
You can get lost in any library, no matter the size. But the more lost you are, the more things you’ll find. ~ Millie Florence
We tell ourselves stories in order to live. ~ Joan Didion
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
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
There are worse crimes than burning books. One of them is not reading them. ~ Ray Bradbury
Books are the perfect entertainment: no commercials, no batteries, hours of enjoyment for each dollar spent. What I wonder is why everybody doesn’t carry a book around for those inevitable dead spots in life. ~ Stephen King
I have always imagined that Paradise will be a kind of library. ~ Jorge Luis Borges
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
People can lose their lives in libraries. They ought to be warned. ~ Saul Bellow
I believe there is power in words, power in asserting our existence, our experience, our lives, through words. ~ Jesmyn Ward
Knowledge sets us free, art sets us free. A great library is freedom. ~ Ursula K. Le Guin
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… ~ Dwight D. Eisenhower
Read. Read. Read. Just don’t read one type of book. Read different books by various authors so that you develop different styles. ~ R.L. Stine
Reality doesn’t always give us the life that we desire, but we can always find what we desire between the pages of books. ~ Adelise M. Cullens
My library serves as a visual reminder of what I don’t know. ~ Shane Parrish
One glance at (a book) and you hear the voice of another person – perhaps someone dead for thousands of years. Across the millenia, the author is speaking, clearly and silently, inside your head, directly to you. Writing is perhaps the greatest of human inventions, binding together people, citizens of distant epochs, who never knew one another. Books break the shackles of time. ~ Carl Sagan
We shouldn’t teach great books; we should teach a love of reading. ~ B.F. Skinner
Read the best books first, or you may not have a chance to read them at all. ~ Henry David Thoreau
The relevant equation is: Knowledge = power = energy = matter = mass; a good bookshop is just a genteel Black Hole that knows how to read. ~ Terry Pratchett
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 story is truly finished–and meaning is made–not when the author adds the last period, but when the reader enters. ~ Celeste Ng
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
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
The more that you read, the more things you will know. The more that you learn, the more places you’ll go. ~ Dr. Seuss
There is no frigate like a book to take us lands away. ~ Emily Dickinson
Writing is perhaps the greatest of human inventions, binding together people who never knew each other, citizens of distant epochs. Books break the shackles of time. A book is proof that humans are capable of magic. ~ Carl Sagan
Funny Quotes About Reading and Books
I am simply a ‘book drunkard.’Books have the same irresistible temptation for me that liquor has for its devotee. I cannot withstand them. ~ L.M. Montgomery
Be careful about reading health books. You may die of a misprint. ~ Mark Twain
Always look on the bright side of life. Otherwise, it’ll be too dark to read. ~ Unknown
Never judge a book by its movie. ~ J.W. Eagan
I know some who are constantly drunk on books as other men are drunk on whiskey. ~ H.L. Mencken
A bookstore is one of the only pieces of evidence we have that people are still thinking. ~ Jerry Seinfield
Always read something that makes you look good if you die in the middle of it. ~ P J O’Rouke
The things I want to know are in books; my best friend is the man who’ll get me a book I ain’t read. ~ Abraham Linco
Outside of a dog, a book is a man’s best friend. Inside of a dog, it’s too dark to read. ~ Groucho Marx
I find television very educating. Every time somebody turns on the set, I go into the other room and read a book. ~ Groucho Marx
So, what’s your favorite quote about books and reading?
Or better yet, which one feels like it was written just for you?
Drop it in the comments or save this collection to come back to when you need a little bookish magic.
After all, quotes, like books, have a way of finding us when we need them most.
Happy reading, fellow book lovers!
Pin These Bookish Quotes That Deserve a Spot on Your Shelf (and Board)
