1. “Reading is a discount ticket to everywhere.”- Mary Schmich
  2. “Reading without reflecting is like eating without digesting.”- Edmund Burke
  3. “The greatest gift is a passion for reading.”- Elizabeth Hardwick
  4. “Reading will give you lasting pleasure.”- First Lady Laura Bush (quoted in U.S. News & World Report)
  5. “Once you learn to read, you will be forever free.”- Frederick Douglass
  6. Not all readers are leaders, but all leaders are readers.”Harry S. Truman
  7. “Reading takes us away from home, but more important, it finds homes for us everywhere.”Hazel Rochman
  8. “A book is the most effective weapon against intolerance and ignorance.”Lyndon Baines Johnson
  9. “The man who does not read good books has no advantage over the man who can't read.”- Mark Twain
  10. “Reading aloud with children is known to be the single most important activity for building the knowledge and skills they will eventually require for learning to read.”Marilyn Jager Adams
  11. “Reading gives us someplace to go when we have to stay where we are.”- Mason Cooley
  12. “There is no substitute for books in the life of a child.”- May Ellen Chase
  13. “Reading is a basic tool in the living of a good life.”- Mortimer Adler
  14. “You teach a child to read, and he or she will be able to pass a literacy test.”- President George W. Bush (Townsend, Tennessee, Feb. 21, 2001
  15. “A man is known by the books he reads.”- Ralph Waldo Emerson
  16. “Reading is to the mind what exercise is to the body.”- Richard Steele
  17. “A writer only begins a book. A reader finishes it.”- Samuel Johnson
  18. “Choose an author as you choose a friend.”- Sir Christopher Wren
  19. “To learn to read is to light a fire; every syllable that is spelled out is a spark.”- Victor Hugo
  20. “There is more treasure in books than in all the pirate's loot on Treasure Island.”- Walt Disney
  21. “I divide all readers into two classes: Those who read to remember and those who read to forget.”- William Phelps
  22. “We read to know we are not alone.”- C.S. Lewis
  23. “The reading of all good books is like conversation with the finest men of the past centuries.”– Descartes
  24. “The more you read, the more things you will know. The more that you learn, the more places you'll go.”- Dr. Seuss, "I Can Read With My Eyes Shut!"
  25. "To read is to empower
    To empower is to write
    To write is to influence
    To Influence is to change
    To change is to live."
    ~ Jane Evershed ~
  26. "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
  27. "A truly great library contains something in it to offend everyone."Jo Godwin
  28. "If you want to get laid, go to college. If you want an education, go to the library."Frank Zappa
  29. "A library should be like a pair of open arms."Roger Rosenblatt
  30. have always imagined that Paradisewill be a kind of library. Jorge Luis Borges (1899-1986)
  31. People die, but books never die.~ Anonymous
  32. Learn as much by writing as by reading.~ Lord Acton ~
  33. “Teaching reading IS rocket science.” Louisa Moats
  34. “Read in order to live.”Gustave Flaubert“
  35. A home without books is a body without soul.”Marcus Tullius Cicero
  36. If you read a lot of books you are considered well read. But if you watch a lot of TV, you're not considered well viewed.”Lily Tomlin
  37. Reading is a means of thinking with another person's mind; it forces you to stretch your own.”Charles Scribner, Jr.
  38. Reading makes immigrants of us all. It takes us away from home, but more important, it finds homes for us everywhere.” Jean Rhys
  39. Reading is thinking with someone else's head instead of one's own”Arthur Schopenhauer
  40. Real luxury is time and opportunity to read for pleasure”Jane Brody
  41. “In a very real sense, people who have read good literature have lived more than people who cannot or will not read.”S. I. Hayakawa
  42. "Tell me what you read and I'll tell you who you are" is true enough, but I'd know you better if you told me what you reread.”Francois Muriac
  43. A good book on your shelf is a friend that turns its back on you and remains a friend. ~Author Unknown
  44. A book is like a garden carried in the pocket. ~Chinese Proverb
  45. Books can be dangerous. The best ones should be labeled "This could change your life." ~Helen Exley
  46. Books are lighthouses erected in the great sea of time. ~E.P. Whipple
  47. Books are embalmed minds. ~Bovee
  48. Books are immortal sons deifying their sires. ~Plato
  49. No entertainment is so cheap as reading, nor any pleasure so lasting. ~Mary Wortley Montagu
  50. When something can be read without effort, great effort has gone into its writing.”Enrique Jardiel Poncela
  51. Reading is to the mind what exercise is to the body.”Joseph Addison
  52. A house without books is like a room without windows. ~Heinrich Mann
  53. A book is a garden, an orchard, a storehouse, a party, a company by the way, a counsellor, a multitude of counsellors. ~Henry Ward Beecher
  54. The wise man reads both books and life itself. ~Lin Yutang
  55. I like intellectual reading. It's to my mind what fiber is to my body. ~Grey Livingston
  56. To read a book for the first time is to make an acquaintance with a new friend; to read it for a second time is to meet an old one. ~Chinese Saying
  57. We should read to give our souls a chance to luxuriate. ~Henry Miller
  58. Reading well is one of the great pleasures that solitude can afford you. ~Harold Bloom
  59. He who lends a book is an idiot. He who returns the book is more of an idiot. ~Arabic Proverb
  60. Never lend books, for no one ever returns them; the only books I have in my library are books that other folks have lent me. ~Anatole France
  61. A man may as well expect to grow stronger by always eating as wiser by always reading. ~Jeremy Collier
  62. Books are delightful society. If you go into a room and find it full of books - even without taking them from the shelves they seem to speak to you, to bid you welcome. ~William Ewart Gladstone
  63. Books support us in our solitude and keep us from being a burden to ourselves. ~Jeremy Collier
  64. The habit of reading is the only enjoyment in which there is no alloy; it lasts when all other pleasures fade.”Anthony Trollope
  65. Men of power have no time to read; yet the men who do not read are unfit for power”Michael Foot
  66. “People say that life is the thing, but I prefer reading.”- Logan Pearsall Smith
  67. “Listening to good models of fluent reading, students can learn how a reader's voice can help text make sense.”M.R. Kuhn & S.A. Stahl, "Fluency: A Review of Development and Remedial Practices" (2003)
  68. “A text is at a students' independent reading level if they can read it with about 95% accuracy.”Marie B. Clay, "An observation survey of early literacy achievement" (1993)
  69. Books let us into their souls and lay open to us the secrets of our own. ~William Hazlitt
  70. 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
  71. The oldest books are still only just out to those who have not read them. ~Samuel Butler
  72. He fed his spirit with the bread of books. ~Edwin Markham
  73. Bread of flour is good; but there is bread, sweet as honey, if we would eat it, in a good book. ~John Ruskin
  74. Most books, like their authors, are born to die; of only a few books can it be said that death hath no dominion over them; they live, and their influence lives forever. ~J. Swartz
  75. I love to lose myself in other men's minds.... Books think for me. ~Charles Lamb
  76. That is a good book which is opened with expectation and closed with profit. ~Amos Bronson Alcott
  77. The multitude of books is making us ignorant. ~Voltaire
  78. Reading is to the mind what exercise is to the body. It is wholesome and bracing for the mind to have its faculties kept on the stretch. ~Augustus Hare
  79. Books have to be read (worse luck it takes so long a time). It is the only way of discovering what they contain. A few savage tribes eat them, but reading is the only method of assimilation revealed to the West. ~E.M. Forster
  80. Let your bookcases and your shelves be your gardens and your pleasure-grounds. Pluck the fruit that grows therein, gather the roses, the spices, and the myrrh. ~Judah Ibn Tibbon
  81. 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
  82. Reading is the basics for all learning. -Bush, GeorgeW(alker)

- Welcome to The Quote Garden!
celebrating 11 years online1998-2009

Quotations about Books & Reading

A good book on your shelf is a friend that turns its back on you and remains a friend. ~Author Unknown
A book is the only place in which you can examine a fragile thought without breaking it, or explore an explosive idea without fear it will go off in your face. It is one of the few havens remaining where a man's mind can get both provocation and privacy. ~Edward P. Morgan
The worth of a book is to be measured by what you can carry away from it. ~James Bryce
Anyone who says they have only one life to live must not know how to read a book. ~Author Unknown
A good book should leave you... slightly exhausted at the end. You live several lives while reading it. ~William Styron, interview, Writers at Work, 1958
There is a great deal of difference between an eager man who wants to read a book and a tired man who wants a book to read. ~G.K. Chesterton
Many people, other than the authors, contribute to the making of a book, from the first person who had the bright idea of alphabetic writing through the inventor of movable type to the lumberjacks who felled the trees that were pulped for its printing. It is not customary to acknowledge the trees themselves, though their commitment is total. ~Forsyth and Rada, Machine Learning
If there's a book you really want to read but it hasn't been written yet, then you must write it. ~Toni Morrison
A good book has no ending. ~R.D. Cumming
I would be most content if my children grew up to be the kind of people who think decorating consists mostly of building enough bookshelves. ~Anna Quindlen, "Enough Bookshelves," New York Times, 7 August 1991
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
Always read something that will make you look good if you die in the middle of it. ~P.J. O'Rourke
Outside of a dog, a book is man's best friend. Inside of a dog it's too dark to read. ~Groucho Marx
I find television to be very educating. Every time somebody turns on the set, I go in the other room and read a book. ~Groucho Marx
The man who does not read good books has no advantage over the man who can't read them. ~Mark Twain, attributed
A book reads the better which is our own, and has been so long known to us, that we know the topography of its blots, and dog's ears, and can trace the dirt in it to having read it at tea with buttered muffins. ~Charles Lamb, Last Essays of Elia, 1833
Let books be your dining table,
And you shall be full of delights
Let them be your mattress
And you shall sleep restful nights.
~Author Unknown
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 Robert Gissing
A book is like a garden carried in the pocket. ~Chinese Proverb
There's nothing to match curling up with a good book when there's a repair job to be done around the house. ~Joe Ryan
Books let us into their souls and lay open to us the secrets of our own. ~William Hazlitt
My test of a good novel is dreading to begin the last chapter. ~Thomas Helm
A dirty book is rarely dusty. ~Author Unknown
As a rule reading fiction is as hard to me as trying to hit a target by hurling feathers at it. I need resistance to celebrate! ~William James
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
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
A book must be an ice-axe to break the seas frozen inside our soul. ~Franz Kafka
Lord! when you sell a man a book you don't sell 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. ~Christopher Morley
Books serve to show a man that those original thoughts of his aren't very new after all. ~Abraham Lincoln
The smallest bookstore still contains more ideas of worth than have been presented in the entire history of television. ~Andrew Ross

I've never known any trouble that an hour's reading didn't assuage. ~Charles de Secondat, Baron de la Brède et de Montesquieu, Pensées Diverses
To sit alone in the lamplight with a book spread out before you, and hold intimate converse with men of unseen generations - such is a pleasure beyond compare. ~Kenko Yoshida
Fiction reveals truths that reality obscures. ~Jessamyn West
I suggest that the only books that influence us are those for which we are ready, and which have gone a little farther down our particular path than we have yet got ourselves. ~E.M. Forster, Two Cheers for Democracy, 1951
TV. If kids are entertained by two letters, imagine the fun they'll have with twenty-six. Open your child's imagination. Open a book. ~Author Unknown
People say that life is the thing, but I prefer reading. ~Logan Pearsall Smith, Trivia, 1917
Books had instant replay long before televised sports. ~Bern Williams
How many a man has dated a new era in his life from the reading of a book. ~Henry David Thoreau, Walden
To choose a good book, look in an inquisitor’s prohibited list. ~John Aikin
Books - the best antidote against the marsh-gas of boredom and vacuity. ~George Steiner
In reading, a lonely quiet concert is given to our minds; all our mental faculties will be present in this symphonic exaltation. ~Stéphane Mallarmé
Books are the bees which carry the quickening pollen from one to another mind. ~James Russell Lowell
Books can be dangerous. The best ones should be labeled "This could change your life." ~Helen Exley
There is a wonder in reading Braille that the sighted will never know: to touch words and have them touch you back. ~Jim Fiebig
This will never be a civilized country until we expend more money for books than we do for chewing gum. ~Elbert Hubbard
Good friends, good books and a sleepy conscience: this is the ideal life. ~Mark Twain
A book is to me like a hat or coat - a very uncomfortable thing until the newness has been worn off. ~Charles B. Fairbanks
If you resist reading what you disagree with, how will you ever acquire deeper insights into what you believe? The things most worth reading are precisely those that challenge our convictions. ~Author Unknown
Books are the glass of council to dress ourselves by. ~Bulstrode Whitlock
Books are not made for furniture, but there is nothing else that so beautifully furnishes a house. ~Henry Ward Beecher
Reading means borrowing. ~Georg Christoph Lichtenberg, Aphorisms
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
Until I feared I would lose it, I never loved to read. One does not love breathing. ~Harper Lee
The scholar only knows how dear these silent, yet eloquent, companions of pure thoughts and innocent hours become in the season of adversity. When all that is worldly turns to dross around us, these only retain their steady value. ~Washington Irving
When you reread a classic you do not see more in the book than you did before; you see more in you than was there before. ~Clifton Fadiman
For friends... do but look upon good Books: they are true friends, that will neither flatter nor dissemble. ~Francis Bacon
A book that is shut is but a block. ~Thomas Fuller
In books lies the soul of the whole Past Time: the articulate audible voice of the Past, when the body and material substance of it has altogether vanished like a dream. ~Thomas Carlyle
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