Famous Quotes on Reading and Well-Being

Reading strengthens your mind, which is essential to your well-being. In this information age, you can find plenty of opportunities to read – from social media posts and articles, to books and research papers. Reading content that both informs and inspires you will bring many well-being benefits into your life. Research reveals that just 30 minutes a day of reading can improve people’s life experiences. Here are some famous motivational quotes on reading benefits:

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

“The whole world opened to me when I learned to read.” – Mary M. Bethune

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

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

“Words can be like X-rays if you use them properly – they’ll go through anything. You read and you’re pierced.” – Aldous Huxley

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

“Reading is escape, and the opposite of escape; it’s a way to make contact with reality after a day of making things up, and it’s a way of making contact with someone else’s imagination after a day that’s all too real.” – Nora Ephron

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

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

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

“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

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

“A capacity and taste for reading gives access to whatever has already been discovered by others.” – Abraham Lincoln

“I will defend the importance of bedtime stories to my last gasp.” – JK Rowling

“Whenever you read a good book, somewhere in the world a door opens to allow in more light.” – Vera Nazarian

“Literacy is a bridge from misery to hope.” – Kofi Annan

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

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

“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

“We read to know we are not alone.” – C.S. Lewis

“To read is to fly: it is to soar to a point of vantage which gives a view over wide terrains of history, human variety, ideas, shared experience and the fruits of many inquiries.” – AC Grayling

“The greatest gift is a passion for reading.” – Elizabeth Hardwick

“Read. Everything you can get your hands on. Read until words become your friends. Then when you need to find one, they will jump into your mind, waving their hands for you to pick them. And you can select whichever you like, just like a captain choosing a stickball team.” – Karen Witemeyer

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

“Across the millennia, the author is speaking, clearly and silently, inside your head, directly to you. Writing is perhaps the greatest of human inventions, binding together people, citizens of distant epochs, who never knew one another. Books break the shackles of time – proof that humans can work magic.” – Carl Sagan

“Books are lighthouses erected in the great sea of time.” – E.P. Whipple

“Reading takes us away from home, but more important, it finds homes for us everywhere.” – Hazel Rochman

“Reading is important, because if you can read, you can learn anything about everything and everything about

anything.” – Tomie dePaola

“Reading will give you lasting pleasure.” – Laura Bush

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

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

“To survive, we must tell stories.” – Umberto Eco

“He who loves reading has everything within his reach.” – William Godwin

“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 person’s mind can get both provocation and privacy.” – Edward P. Morgan

“Read in order to live.” – Gustave Flaubert

“Just the knowledge that a good book is awaiting one at the end of a long day makes that day happier.” – Kathleen Norris

“Of all the diversions of life, there is none so proper to fill up its empty spaces as the reading of useful and entertaining authors.” – Joseph Addison

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

“No entertainment is so cheap as reading, nor any pleasure so lasting. She will not want new fashions nor regret the loss of expensive diversions or variety of company if she can be amused with an author in her closet.” – Lady Montagu

“It is well to read everything of something, and something of everything.” –  Lord Henry P. Brougham

“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 is the most effective weapon against intolerance and ignorance.” – Lyndon Baines Johnson

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

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

“Reading is a discount ticket to everywhere.” – Mary Schmich

“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 William Eliot

“Reading is a basic tool in the living of a good life.” – Mortimer Adler

“In the highest civilization, the book is still the highest delight. He who has once known its satisfactions is provided with a resource against calamity.” – Ralph Waldo Emerson

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

“It is books that are the key to the wide world; if you can’t do anything else, read all that you can.” – Jane Hamilton

“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

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

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

“Choose an author as you choose a friend.” – Sir Christopher Wren

“I must say that I find television very educational. The minute somebody turns it on, I go to the library and read a book.” – Groucho Marx

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

“Think before you speak. Read before you think.” – Fran Lebowitz

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