53 Inspiring Reading Quotes

In a world overflowing with information and ever-evolving technologies, the simple act of reading remains a timeless pursuit that enriches the mind and soul. Whether you are an avid bibliophile or someone who occasionally dives into the pages of a good book, the power of carefully woven words can inspire and transform. Reading allows us to embark on journeys through time and imagination, offering insights and perspectives that transcend our everyday experiences. In this post, we delve into a curated collection of 53 inspiring reading quotes that celebrate the essence of books and the profound impact they can have on our lives. Let these words invigorate your love for reading and remind you of the endless wonders that await within the pages of a book.

1. “What refuge is there for the victim who is oppressed with the feeling that there are a thousand new books he ought to read, while life is only long enough for him to attempt to read a hundred?” - Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr.

2. “Today a reader, tomorrow a leader.” - Margaret Fuller

3. “Every man with a little leisure and enough money for railway tickets, every man, indeed, 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

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

5. “Unless their use by readers bring them to life, books are indeed dead things.” - Lawrence Clark Powell

6. “Reading to small children is a specialty.” - Clifton Fadiman

7. “I don't remember ever feeling lonely; in fact, on the rare occasions when I met other children I found their games and their talk far less interesting than the adventures and dialogues I read in my books.” - Alberto Manguel

8. “the same question arose in every soul: "For what, for whom, must I kill and be killed?"... p982” - Leo Tolstoy

9. “Reading was a joy, a desperately needed escape -- I didn't read to learn, I was reading to read.” - Christian Bauman

10. “I write for the same reason I read: because it's all there is for me.” - Christian Bauman

11. “Reading, for me, is like this: consumptive, pleasing, calming, as much as edifying. It's how I feel after a good dinner. That's why I do it so often: It feels wonderful. The book is mind and I insert myself into it, cover it entire, ear my way through every last slash and dot. That's something you can do with a book, unlike television or movies or the Internet. You can eat it, or mark it, like a dog does on a hydrant. ” - Tara Bray Smith

12. “When a poet settled down to write a poem, could he foresee the lines he would write? Did his head constantly spin with riddles and rhymes and was his only job to put them down? What if he couldn’t get them to make sense, and no one, not even the person he cared for most, could have pleasure in reading it? What would he do?” - Alysha Speer

13. “Read "The Story of O." Convince yourself that it was in fact written by a woman or someone who thinks like a woman.” - Whitney Otto

14. “The library was a little old shabby place. Francie thought it was beautiful. The feeling she had about it was as good as the feeling she had about church. She pushed open the door and went in. She liked the combined smell of worn leather bindings, library past and freshly inked stamping pads better than she liked the smell of burning incense at high mass.” - Betty Smith

15. “Logos and branding are so important. In a big part of the world, people cannot read French or English--but are great in remembering signs” - Karl Lagerfeld

16. “Life's adventures make great reading!” - Denise Robbins

17. “I don't write like this in order to show how clever and well read I am--though I am rather clever and well read as a matter of fact.” - John Heath-Stubbs

18. “It had been a good day, all things considered. I had managed rather well on my own. I opened Grandfather's Bible. This is what it would be like when I had my own shop, or when I traveled abroad. I would always read before sleeping. One day, I'd be so rich I would have a library full of novel to choose from. But I would always end the evening with a Bible passage.” - Laurie Halse Anderson

19. “The trouble in life is not that you are extraordinarily or ordinarily talented but you are read posthumously.” - Santosh Kalwar

20. “I foresee the day when we shall read nothing but telegrams and prayers.” - Emil Cioran

21. “Ah, but is it not the mind that is the real grace of Homo sapiens? All the things to think about! All the things to read and appreciate! All the arts! All the things of the spirit!” - Carol Emshwiller

22. “I’m trying in all my stories to get the feeling of the actual life across—not to just depict life—or criticize it—but to actually make it alive. So that when you have read something by me you actually experience the thing. You can’t do this without putting in the bad and the ugly as well as what is beautiful. Because if it is all beautiful you can’t believe in it. Things aren’t that way.” - Ernest Hemingway

23. “Good books make you ask questions. Bad readers want everything answered.” - Scott Westerfeld

24. “I realise people exist who don't read. But it's like I knew there were people who didn't breathe or eat: I can't imagine a life like that.” - Sarah Rees Brennan

25. “Besides the alternate universe offered by a book, the quiet space of a museum was my favorite place to go. My mom said I was an escapist at heart . . . that I preferred imaginary worlds to the real one. It’s true that I’ve always been able to yank myself out of this world and plunge myself into another.” - Amy Plum

26. “Un livre est un peu de silence entre les mains du lecteur.Celui qui écrit calme.Celui qui le lit ne rompt pas le silence.” - Pascal Quignard

27. “I used to think I was the strangest person in the worldbut then I thought, there are so many people in the world, there must be someone just like me who feels bizarre and flawed in the same ways I doI would imagine her, and imagine that she must be out there thinking of me too.well, I hope that if you are out there you read this and know that yes, it’s true I’m here, and I’m just as strange as you.” - Rebecca Katherine Martin

28. “Because you don't learn anything unless you can find the patience to read. TV takes that away from you. It robs you from your mind.” - Markus Zusak

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

30. “He passed his hands over some of the fine embossed bindings as he thought, I am a book also, words and thoughts and stories held together by flesh. We open and close ourselves to the world. We are read by others or put away by them. We wait to be seen, sitting quietly on shelves for someone to bother having a look inside us. ” - Ari Berk

31. “School did give me one of the greatest gifts of my life, though. I learned how to read, and for that I remain thankful. I would have died otherwise. As soon as I was able, I read, alone. Under the covers with a flashlight or in my corner of the attic—I sought solace in books. It was from books that I started to get an inkling of the kinds of assholes I was dealing with. I found allies too, in books, characters my age who were going through or had triumphed against the same bullshit.” - Craig Ferguson

32. “Jack reads too many books. He thinks we're going to drive all year and have great adventures.” - Steven Herrick

33. “And I feel like a real Dad when I read to her at night. She won't sleep without one story, at least.” - Steven Herrick

34. “Sono convinto che chi non legge resta uno stupido. Anche se nella vita sa destreggiarsi, il fatto di non ingerire regolarmente parole scritte lo condanna ineluttabilmente all'ignoranza, indipendentemente dai suoi averi e dalle sue attività.” - Edward Bunker

35. “When we unnecessarily elongate the process of "learning to read," we postpone "reading to learn" - learning itself - by years.” - Mike Schmoker

36. “You should've thought of that before becoming a fireman.""Thought!" he said. "Was I given a choice? I was raised to think the best thing in the world is not to read. The best thing is television and radio and ball games and a home I can't afford and, Good Lord, now, only now I realize what I've done. My grandfather and father were firemen. Walking in my sleep I followed them.” - Ray Bradbury

37. “how weird it would be to have around you only as many books as you have time to read in the rest of your life. And I remain deeply attached to the physical book and the physical bookshop.” - Julian Barnes

38. “I am more optimistic, both about reading and about books. There will always be non-readers, bad readers, lazy readers – there always were. Reading is a majority skill but a minority art. Yet nothing can replace the exact, complicated, subtle communion between absent author and entranced, present reader.” - Julian Barnes

39. “You must learn to read well, Marisa. As long as you're a good reader, you can learn anything, do anything.” - Anna Jeffrey

40. “If you read fast and read all, maybe some of the sand will stay in the sieve.” - Ray Bradbury

41. “Hay quienes no pueden imaginar un mundo sin pájaros; hay quienes no pueden imaginar un mundo sin agua; en lo que a mi se refiere, soy incapaz de imaginar un mundo sin libros.There are those who cannot imagine a world without birds; there are those who cannot imagine a world without water; but in my case I am unable to imagine a world without books.” - Jorge Luis Borges

42. “:Paintings are easy to see," he said after a moment. "Open, presented flat to the eye. Words are not easy. Words have to be discovered, deep in their pages, deciphered, translated, read. Words are symbols to be encoded, their letters trees in a forest, enmeshed, their tangled meanings never finally picked apart.” - Catherine Fisher

43. “The number of books students read...is among the best indicators of student reading development.” - Mike Schmoker

44. “This is unbearable ... God. These books she'll never read. Her Life's Library.” - John Green

45. “And no matter what anybody says, I don't believe all this trouble started when women got the vote. As far as I'm concerned, it goddamn well got started when you taught each other how to read.” - Susan Elizabeth Phillips

46. “A little known fact: I read all the time. books were the one thing that got me out of Gatlin, even if it was only for a little while.” - Kami Garcia

47. “One life to read!” - Nakia R. Laushaul

48. “Read. Read all the time. Read as a matter of principle, as a matter of self-respect. Read as a nourishing staple of life.” (Wellesly High School commencement speech, “You Are Not Special”, 6-12)” - Teacher David McCullough

49. “A person who reads lives more than one life, but that means that they die more than once as well.” - Deanna Vasquez

50. “I kissed my fingers,held my palm flat beside my mouth and blew it into the air that surrounded her memory. I closed my eyes, thinking this was one of those moments you see in movies or read about in books where everything comes together.” - Belinda Jeffrey

51. “You need that pride in yourself, as well as a sense, when you are sitting on Page 297 of a book, that the book is going to be read, that somebody is going to care. You can't ever be sure about that, but you need the sense that it's important, that it's not typing; it's writing.” - Roger Kahn

52. “Read in oreder to live” - Gustave Flaubert

53. “Forget boys and read a good book. Or study. When you're twenty-five and ranking in the big bucks, men will be falling all over you're a successful professional woman.” - Stephie Davis