We love books. Beach read or literary classic, nothing beats a great Book. Research has shown that reading books are important for the mind, heart, and soul. Though many of us live busy lives, it’s important to find the time to read. And these 120 inspiring, warm and squishy quotes about books and reading are here to remind you of that. For, as author Anna Quindlen says, “Books are the plane, and the train, and the road. They are the destination, and the journey. They are home.”

Read on to see the many insightful, witty, and motivating things that have been said about reading by authors, poets, scientists, artists, visionaries and even comedians. We hope you enjoy these quotes about books and reading!

120 Quotes About Books & Reading

Top 10 Book Quotes

“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

“Books are the plane, and the train, and the road. They are the destination, and the journey. They are home.” – Anna Quindlen

“Books were my pass to personal freedom.” – Oprah Winfrey

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

“I have a passion for teaching kids to become readers, to become comfortable with a book, not daunted. Books shouldn’t be daunting, they should be funny, exciting and wonderful; and learning to be a reader gives a terrific advantage.” – Roald Dahl

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

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

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

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

“We are of opinion that instead of letting books grow moldy behind an iron grating, far from the vulgar gaze, it is better to let them wear out by being read.” – Jules Verne

Related: Reading Quotes, Writing Quotes, Learning Quotes

Famous Book Quotes

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

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

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

“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

“Somebody who only reads newspapers and at best books of contemporary authors looks to me like an extremely near-sighted person who scorns eyeglasses. He is completely dependent on the prejudices and fashions of his times, since he never gets to see or hear anything else.” – Albert Einstein

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

“Books serve to show a man that those original thoughts of his aren’t very new after all.” – Abraham Lincoln

“Despite the enormous quantity of books, how few people read! And if one reads profitably, one would realize how much stupid stuff the vulgar herd is content to swallow every day.” – Voltaire

“Have books ‘happened’ to you? Unless your answer to that question is ‘yes,’ I’m unsure how to talk to you.” – Haruki Murakami

“I cannot remember the books I’ve read any more than the meals I have eaten; even so, they have made me.” – Ralph Waldo Emerson

“I do believe something very magical can happen when you read a book.” – J.K. Rowling

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

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

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

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

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

Best Book Quotes

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

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

“A book is a version of the world. If you do not like it, ignore it; or offer your own version in return.” – Salman Rushdie

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

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

“Books always make a room better.” – Tanya Boteju

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

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

“Books are mirrors: you only see in them what you already have inside you.” – Carlos Ruiz Zafón

“Books are no more threatened by Kindle than stairs by elevators.” – Stephen Fry

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

“Books break the shackles of time – proof that humans can work magic.” – Carl Sagan

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

“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

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

“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

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

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

“Literature is the safe and traditional vehicle through which we learn about the world and pass on values from one generation to the next. Books save lives.” – Laurie Anderson

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

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

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

“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

“What better occupation, really, than to spend the evening at the fireside with a book, with the wind beating on the windows and the lamp burning bright.” – Gustave Flaubert

“When you give someone a book, you don’t give him just paper, ink, and glue, you give him the possibility of a whole new world.” – Christopher Marley

Book Quotes About Reading

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“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

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

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

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

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

“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

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

“The worst thing about new books is that they keep us from reading the old ones.” – Joseph Joubert

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

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

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

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

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

“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

“No book is really worth reading at the age of ten which is not equally – and often far more – worth reading at the age of fifty and beyond.” – C.S. Lewis

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

“I was read to as a small child, I read on my own as soon as I could, and I recall being more or less overwhelmed again and again — if not by what the books actually said, by what they suggested, what they helped me to imagine.” – Marilynne Robinson

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

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

“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

“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

“It is a good rule after reading a new book, never to allow yourself another new one till you have read an old one in between.” – C.S. Lewis

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

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

“I’m old-fashioned and think that reading books is the most glorious pastime that humankind has yet devised.” – Wisława Szymborska

“I declare after all there is no enjoyment like reading! How much sooner one tires of any thing than of a book! — When I have a house of my own, I shall be miserable if I have not an excellent library.” – Jane Austen

“I can’t imagine a man really enjoying a book and reading it only once.” – C.S. Lewis

“I can feel infinitely alive curled up on the sofa reading a book.” – Benedict Cumberbatch

“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

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

“From the reading of ‘good books’ there comes a richness of life that can be obtained in no other way.” – Gordon B. Hinckley

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

“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 there is a book that you want to read, but it hasn’t been written yet, you must be the one to write it.” – Toni Morrison

“When we read a story, we inhabit it. The covers of the book are like a roof and four walls. What is to happen next will take place within the four walls of the story. And this is possible because the story’s voice makes everything its own.” – John Berger

Book Quotes About Love

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“Books are good company, in sad times and happy times, for books are people – people who have managed to stay alive by hiding between the covers of a book. – E.B. White

“A first book has some of the sweetness of a first love.” – Robert Aris Willmott

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

“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

“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

“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

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

“Books 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

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

Book Quotes About Life

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“What kind of life can you have in a house without books?” – Sherman Alexie

“It is a great thing to start life with a small number of really good books which are your very own.” – Arthur Conan Doyle

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

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

“I read a book one day and my whole life was changed.” – Orhan Pamuk

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

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

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

Book Lover Quotes

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“We live for books.” – Umberto Eco

“A book is a dream you hold in your hands.” – Neil Gaiman

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

“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 in The Book of Phoenix

“I still love books. Nothing a computer can do can compare to a book. You can’t really put a book on the Internet.” – Ray Bradbury

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

“I grabbed my book and opened it up. I wanted to smell it. Heck, I wanted to kiss it. Yes, kiss it. That’s right, I am a book kisser. Maybe that’s kind of perverted or maybe it’s just romantic and highly intelligent.” – Sherman Alexie

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

“It is is better to know one book intimately than a hundred superficially.” – Donna Tartt

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

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

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

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

Book Quotes About Friendship

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

“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

“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

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

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

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

“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

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