Does reading play an important part in your life? If you’re reading this, it probably does. Whether you prefer novels, non-fiction, articles, reports, news, or anything else, we’re in the same boat – we enjoy reading. More than the sheer pleasure of reading and the knowledge it brings us, reading comes with many proven benefits, including stress reduction, vocabulary expansion, a boost of our analytical thinking skills, improved focus and concentration, and tranquility. And, of course, reading improves our writing. Here are some wonderful quotes about reading to inspire you to keep on reading today, tomorrow, and for the rest of your life.
-
“Reading is like thinking, like praying, like talking to a friend, like expressing your ideas, like listening to other people’s ideas, like listening to music, like looking at the view, like taking a walk on the beach.” – Roberto Bolaño
-
“It is a most wonderful comfort to sit alone beneath a lamp, book spread before you, and commune with someone from the past whom you have never me.” – Kenko
-
“Books don’t offer real escape, but they can stop a mind scratching itself raw.” – David Mitchell
-
“When I look back, I am so impressed again with the life-giving power of literature. If I were a young person today, trying to gain a sense of myself in the world, I would do that again by reading, just as I did when I was young.” – Maya Angelou
-
“As you read a book word by word and page by page, you participate in its creation, just as a cellist playing a Bach suite participates, note by note, in the creation, the coming-to-be, the existence, of the music. And, as you read and re-read, the book of course participates in the creation of you, your thoughts and feelings, the size and temper of your soul.” – Ursula K. Le Guin
-
“Employ your time in improving yourself by other men’s writings so that you shall come easily by what others have labored hard for.” – Socrates
-
“Reading is a basic tool in the living of a good life.” – Mortimer J. Adler
-
“We don’t read novels to have an experience like life. Heck, we’re living lives, complete with all the incompleteness. We turn to fiction to have an author assure us that it means something.” – Orson Scott Card
-
“People wonder why the novel is the most popular form of literature; people wonder why it is read more than books of science or books of metaphysics. The reason is very simple; it is merely that the novel is more true than they are.” – G.K. Chesterton
-
“The ability to read awoke inside of me some long dormant craving to be mentally alive.” – Malcolm X
-
“We don’t need to have just one favorite. We keep adding favorites. Our favorite book is always the book that speaks most directly to us at a particular stage in our lives. And our lives change. We have other favorites that give us what we most need at that particular time. But we never lose the old favorites. They’re always with us. We just sort of accumulate them.” – Lloyd Alexander
-
“In the library I felt better, words you could trust and look at till you understood them, they couldn’t change half way through a sentence like people, so it was easier to spot a lie.” – Jeanette Winterson
-
“When the Day of Judgment dawns and people, great and small, come marching in to receive their heavenly rewards, the Almighty will gaze upon the mere bookworms and say to Peter, “Look, these need no reward. We have nothing to give them. They have loved reading.” – Virginia Woolf
-
“A book is a dream that you hold in your hand. ” – Neil Gaiman
-
“Books may not change our suffering, books may not protect us from evil, books may not tell us what is good or what is beautiful, and they will certainly not shield us from the common fate of the grave. But books grant us myriad possibilities: the possibility of change, the possibility of illumination.” – Alberto Manguel
-
“A good book is an event in my life.” – Stendhal
-
“It is not true that ‘we have only one life to live’; if we can read, we can live as many more lives and as many kinds of lives as we wish.” – S.I. Hayakawa
boy with a hat 
Nice quotes, I like Ursula’s one in particular, how the book and the reader mutually participate in each other’s creation! Beautifully crafted words. ❤
When you read, you also get to be a part of a world different from yours, and thus a reader can travel from one book to another with a new experience each time, which is why I think an ardent reader is rich with wonderful experiences.
By the way, I am reading Jane Austen's' Sense and Sensibility' now 🙂 .
Quite so! I haven’t read Sense and Sensibility, but I have read Pride and Prejudice. Have you?
I adore books , doesn’t matter what genre they belong to . They give you a window where you can see through other person’s eyes. and its pretty amazing. Good job with the article which connects with all the readers out there.
What are you reading now? I’m a curios person!
well, I just finished “The Alchemist” . I have read it before but this time it felt different. Like I can relate to it more closely.
And thinking of reading some other books. Do you have any book in your mind, that you can suggest?
I enjoyed The Alchemist. Quite inspiring isn’t it? A similar book which is actually one of my favorites is The Little Prince. It’s a children’s book essentially, but it transcends that gracefully… Try it!
will give it shot.
Paulo cohelo is amazing isn’t he?
I have read like 4 books by Paulo and I feel they have a very different kind of soul in them.
No i haven’t, but it is in my reading list. Your views about the book?
Read it a few years in a Romanian translation and enjoyed every bit of it. You should definitely try it.
I sure will 🙂
Fantastic selection. Reading always makes me think about my own choices and the gloomy consequences, if I just sit their in cold righteousness and not take action in whatever it is I wish to pursue.
That’s interesting. Reading does seem to help us with our choices, perhaps because they show us what happens to those who make bad choices.