50 most inspiring quotes about books and reading
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The quotes we’ve put together in this post are not the most famous ones, but all of them have one outstanding merit: they are highly inspiring to rediscover the pleasure of reading (if you forgot how it tastes) or simply to feel the need to reach for a book – now.
You may ask, what book quotes have to do with the ebook site. Ebook sites are still mostly focused on the issues related to technology rather than pleasures related to reading.
We believe that a reader has to learn only as much technology as needed to fully enjoy the magic of reading. Reading in times of digital content is changing, but it doesn’t mean it gives less pleasure – just the opposite.
There is absolutely no difference between a hardcover book or an audiobook or a multimedia book application. There is no difference between a high grammage paper or e-ink screen or a backlit high-resolution Retina display. The biggest pleasure comes from what we read, not from on what we read.
The real difference, though, lies in our attitude to reading. Gilbert K. Chesterton once said: “There is a great deal of difference between an eager man who wants to read a book and the tired man who wants a book to read.”
50 most inspiring quotes about books and reading
No two persons ever read the same book.
–Edmund Wilson
There comes a time when you have to choose between turning the page and closing the book.
–Josh Jameson
Anyone who says they have only one life to live must not know how to read a book.
–Author Unknown
Whenever you read a good book, somewhere in the world a door opens to allow in more light.
–Vera Nazarian
If we encounter a man of rare intellect, we should ask him what books he reads.
–Ralph Waldo Emerson
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
Always read something that will make you look good if you die in the middle of it.
–P.J. O’Rourke
I think of life as a good book. The further you get into it, the more it begins to make sense.
–Harold Kushner
Anyone who says they have only one life to live must not know how to read a book.
–Author Unknown
If you only read the books that everyone else is reading, you can only think what everyone else is thinking.
–Haruki Murakami
There is a difference between a book of two hundred pages from the very beginning, and a book of two hundred pages which is the result of an original eight hundred pages. The six hundred are there. Only you don’t see them.
–Elie Wiesel
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
The most technologically efficient machine that man has ever invented is the book.
–Northrop Frye
A good novel tells us the truth about its hero; but a bad novel tells us the truth about its author.
–G.K. Chesterton
The profession of book writing makes horse racing seem like a solid, stable business.
–John Steinbeck
There is a great deal of difference between an eager man who wants to read a book and the tired man who wants a book to read.
–Gilbert K. Chesterton
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
Are we not like two volumes of one book?
–Marceline Desbordes-Valmore
Keep reading books, but remember that a book is only a book, and you should learn to think for yourself.
–Maxim Gorky
A book is a fragile creature, it suffers the wear of time, it fears rodents, the elements and clumsy hands. so the librarian protects the books not only against mankind but also against nature and devotes his life to this war with the forces of oblivion.
–Umberto Eco
In a good book the best is between the lines.
–Swedish Proverb
There are perhaps no days of our childhood we lived so fully as those we spent with a favorite book.
–Marcel Proust
The books that the world calls immoral are books that show the world its own shame.
–Oscar Wilde
Marriage is a book of which the first chapter is written in poetry and the remaining chapters in prose.
–Beverley Nichols
A book is the only place in which you can examine a fragile thought without breaking it.
–Edward P. Morgan
If one cannot enjoy reading a book over and over again, there is no use in reading it at all.
–Oscar Wilde
All good books are alike in that they are truer than if they had really happened and after you are finished reading one you will feel that all that happened to you and afterwards it all belongs to you: the good and the bad, the ecstasy, the remorse and sorrow, the people and the places and how the weather was.
–Ernest Hemingway
Read the best books first, or you may not have a chance to read them at all.
–Henry David Thoreau
Books support us in our solitude and keep us from being a burden to ourselves.
–Jeremy Collier
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
Make it a rule never to give a child a book you would not read yourself.
–George Bernard Shaw
Books serve to show a man that those original thoughts of his aren’t very new after all.
–Abraham Lincoln
I can’t imagine a man really enjoying a book and reading it only once.
–C.S. Lewis
Where is human nature so weak as in the bookstore?
–Henry Ward Beecher
That is a good book which is opened with expectation and closed with profit.
–Amos Bronson Alcott
A great book should leave you with many experiences, and slightly exhausted at the end. You live several lives while reading.
–William Styron
One always has a better book in one’s mind than one can manage to get onto paper.
–Michael Cunningham
I divide all readers into two classes; those who read to remember and those who read to forget.
–William Lyon Phelps
In old days books were written by men of letters and read by the public. Nowadays books are written by the public and read by nobody.
–Oscar Wilde
There are worse crimes than burning books. One of them is not reading them.
–Joseph Brodsky
What you don’t know would make a great book.
–Sydney Smith
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
Every reader finds himself. The writer’s work is merely a kind of optical instrument that makes it possible for the reader to discern what, without this book, he would perhaps never have seen in himself.
– Marcel Proust
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
Men do not understand books until they have a certain amount of life, or at any rate no man understands a deep book, until he has seen and lived at least part of its contents.
–Ezra Pound
A man may as well expect to grow stronger by always eating as wiser by always reading.
–Jeremy Collier
Books are like mirrors: if a fool looks in, you cannot expect a genius to look out.
–J.K. Rowling
The worst thing about new books is that they keep us from reading the old ones.
–Joseph Joubert
It’s not just the books under fire now that worry me. It is the books that will never be written. The books that will never be read. And all due to the fear of censorship. As always, young readers will be the real losers.
–Judy Blume
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
A good book has no ending.
–R.D. Cumming
Sources: Goodreads, Quote Garden, Brainy Quote.
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For daily quotes on books and reading, let’s connect on Twitter and Facebook. Check also our other posts with quotes:
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