30 Quotable Quotes About Reading

Books, plays, poems, and works of art have inspired millions of people to create their own stories and share their unique perspectives with whoever is willing to read them. Over centuries of spilled ink, typewriters, computers, and messy handwriting, humans have forever left their mark on the world through their written words. Here are 30 different perspectives on reading, from 30 notable people:

  1. “If we encounter a man of rare intellect, we should ask him what books he reads.” -Ralph Waldo Emerson
  2. “For my whole life, my favorite activity was reading. It’s not the most social pastime.” -Audrey Hepburn
  3. “Reading gives us somewhere to go when we have to stay where we are.” -Mason Cooley
  4. “There is no friend as loyal as a book.” -Ernest Hemingway
  5. “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
  6. “Anyone who says they have only one life to live must not know how to read a book.” -unknown author
  7. “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
  8. “Always read something that will make you look good if you die in the middle of it.” -P.J. O’Rourke
  9. “If you only read the books that everyone else is reading, you can only think what everyone else is thinking.” -Haruki Murakami
  10. “The person who deserves most pity is a lonesome one on a rainy day who doesn’t know how to read.” – Benjamin Franklin
  11. “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
  12. “Wear the old coat and buy the new book.” -Austin Phelps
  13. “Luckily, I always travel with a book, just in case I have to wait in line for Santa, or some such inconvenience.” -David Levithan
  14. “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
  15. “The books that the world calls immoral are books that show the world its own shame.” -Oscar Wilde
  16. “A book is a gift you can open again and again.” -Garrison Keillor
  17. “Show me a family of readers, and I will show you the people who move the world.” -Napoléon Bonaparte
  18. “Outside of a dog, a book is a man’s best friend. Inside of a dog, it’s too dark to read.” -Groucho Marx
  19. “Books are good company, in sad times and happy times, for books are people – people who have managed to stay alive by hiding between the covers of a book.” -E.B. White
  20. “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
  21. “You can never get a cup of tea large enough or a book long enough to suit me.” -C.S. Lewis
  22. “Books serve to show a man that those original thoughts of his aren’t very new after all.” -Abraham Lincoln
  23. “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
  24. “A great book should leave you with many experiences, and slightly exhausted at the end. You live several lives while reading.” -William Styron
  25. “Once you learn to read, you will be forever free.” -Frederick Douglas
  26. “Never put off till tomorrow the book you can read today.” -Holbrook Jackson
  27. “I lived in books more than I lived anywhere else.” -Neil Gaiman
  28. “Literature is the most agreeable way of ignoring life.” -Fernando Pessoa
  29. “We read in bed because reading is halfway between life and dreaming, our own consciousness in someone else’s mind.” -Anna Quindlen
  30. “People say that life is the thing, but I prefer reading.” -Logan Pearsall Smith

Ready for More Reading?

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