70 Good Quotes About Reading for Kids & Adults

There’s nothing like a good book. They’re are our gateway to different worlds and our insight (and wisdom) into everything. If you’re an avid reader or want to inspire the next generation, take a look at these quotes about reading and its impact on our world.

Quotes About Reading

“Reading—the best state yet to keep absolute loneliness at bay.” – William Styron

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

“Once you learn to read, you will be forever free.” – Frederick Douglas

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

“To learn to read is to light a fire; every syllable that is spelled out is a spark.” – Victor Hugo

“If you want your children to be intelligent, read them fairy tales. If you want them to be more intelligent, read them more fairy tales.” – Albert Einstein

“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

“One of the greatest gifts adults can give—to their offspring and to their society—is to read to children.” – Carl Sagan

“Not all readers are leaders, but all leaders are readers.” – Harry Truman

“Reading gives us someplace to go when we have to stay where we are.” – Mason Cooley

“There is more treasure in books than in all the pirates’ loot on Treasure Island…” – Walt Disney

“Only a generation of readers will spawn a generation of writers.” – Steven Spielberg

“Many a book is like a key to unknown chambers within the castle of one’s own self.” – Franz Kafka

“A reader lives a thousand lives before he dies, said Jojen. The man who never reads lives only one.” – George R.R. Martin

“No two persons ever read the same book.” – Edmund Wilson

“Reading… a vacation for the mind.” – Dave Barry

“Children are made readers on the laps of their parents.” – Emilie Buchwald

“Reading is departure and arrival.” – Terri Guillemets

“Read about things that wouldn’t keep you up all night long, weeping and tearing out your hair.” – Lemony Snicket

“I never feel lonely if I’ve got a book – they’re like old friends. Even if you’re not reading them over and over again, you know they are there. They sort of tell a story about your journey through life.” – Emilia Fox

“No matter how busy you may think you are, you must find time for reading, or surrender yourself to self-chosen ignorance.” – Confucius

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

“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

“The more that you read, the more things you will know. The more that you learn, the more places you’ll go.” – Dr. Seuss

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

“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.” – Anne Frank

“Books are the ultimate Dumpees: put them down and they’ll wait for you forever; pay attention to them and they always love you back.” – John Green

“I am a part of everything that I have read.” – Theodore Roosevelt

“Reading is to the mind what exercise is to the body.” – Richard Steele

“What is inside books may not all that necessarily be different from what are outside books at all.” – Ernest Agyemang Yeboah

“When you read about the lives of other people, people of different circumstances or similar circumstances, you are part of their lives for that moment. You inhabit their lives, and you feel what they’re feeling, and that is compassion. If we see that reading does allow us that, we see how absolutely essential reading is.” – Amy Tan

“Why can’t people just sit and read books and be nice to each other?” – David Baldacci

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

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

“I have always imagined that paradise will be a kind of library.” – Jorge Luis Borges

“To acquire the habit of reading is to construct for yourself a refuge from almost all the miseries of life.” – W. Somerset Maugham

“I would never read a book if it were possible for me to talk half an hour with the man who wrote it.” – Woodrow Wilson

“No matter who you are, no matter where you live, and no matter how many people are chasing you, what you don’t read is often as important as what you do read.” – Lemony Snicket

“Reading brings us unknown friends” – Honoré de Balzac

“A parent or a teacher has only his lifetime; a good book can teach forever.” – Louis L’Amour

“Reading was a joy, a desperately needed escape — I didn’t read to learn, I was reading to read.” – Christian Bauman

“Let us remember: One book, one pen, one child, and one teacher can change the world.” – Malala Yousafzai

“I do not read a book; I hold a conversation with the author.” – Elbert Hubbard

“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

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

“We read in bed because reading is halfway between life and dreaming, our own consciousness in someone else’s mind.” – Anna Quindlen

“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

“Reading is an act of civilization; it’s one of the greatest acts of civilization because it takes the free raw material of the mind and builds castles of possibilities.” – Ben Okri

“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

“When you lose yourself in a book the hours grow wings and fly.” – Chloe Thurlow

“I read my eyes out and can’t read half enough… the more one reads the more one sees we have to read.” – John Adams

“I feel the need of reading. It is a loss to a man not to have grown up among books.” – Abraham Lincoln

“Reading should not be presented to children as a chore or duty. It should be offered to them as a precious gift.” – Kate DiCamillo

“A good book is the best of friends, the same today and forever.” – Martin Farquhar Tupper

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

“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

“It’s one of the greatest gifts that reading can give a person: easy access to peace inside, even when the world outside is in shambles.” – J. W.

“Today a reader, tomorrow a leader.” – Margaret Fuller

“Reading gives us someplace to go when we have to stay where we are.” – Mason Cooley

“The world belongs to those who read.” – Rick Holland

“An hour spent reading is one stolen from paradise.” – Thomas Wharton

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

“Reading without thinking will confuse you.Thinking without reading will place you in danger.” – Confucius

“The best advice I ever got was that knowledge is power and to keep reading.” – David Bailey

“Reading is a gift. It’s something you can do almost anytime and anywhere. It can be a tremendous way to learn, relax, and even escape.” – Richard Carlson