If you’re a lover of books like I am, you know that this art form has the power to change your life.
From inspiring stories to philosophical ideas, books open our minds and hearts in ways we never imagined before. That’s why I collected the 100 best book lover quotes to help us find the words for why you love reading.
Here Are the 100 Best Book Lover Quotes for Readers
(This post may have afilliate links. Please see my full disclosure)
- “There is no friend as loyal as a book.”—Ernest Hemingway
- “If you only read the books that everyone else is reading, you can only think what everyone else is thinking.”―Haruki Murakami
- “Reading is a basic tool in the living of a good life.”—Joseph Addison
- “A good bookshop is just a genteel Black Hole that knows how to read.”―Terry Pratchett
- “We live for books.”―Umberto Eco
- “Books were safer than other people anyway.”―Neil Gaiman
- “Some books should be tasted, some devoured, but only a few should be chewed and digested thoroughly.”―Sir Francis Bacon
- “So many books, so little time.”—Frank Zappa
- “In the end, we’ll all become stories.”―Margaret Atwood
- “The more that you read, the more things you will know. The more that you learn, the more places you will go.”―Dr. Suess
- “That I can read and be happy while I am reading, is a great blessing.”—Anthony Trollope
- “If we encounter a man of rare intellect, we should ask him what books he reads.”—Ralph Waldo Emerson
- “There are no faster or firmer friendships than those formed between people who love the same books.”—Irving Stone
- “The greatest part of a writer’s time is spent in reading, in order to write; a man will turn over half a library to write one book.”—Christopher Kokoski
- “The richest people are those who own books.”—Anonymous
- “You see, unlike in the movies, there is no THE END sign flashing at the end of books. When I’ve read a book, I don’t feel like I’ve finished anything. So I start a new one.”―Elif Shafak
- “There are many little ways to enlarge your child’s world. Love of books is the best of all.”—Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis
- “To be absorbed by a book is pure bliss and solace.”—Anonymous
- “There is no mistaking a real book when one meets it. It is like falling in love.”—Christopher Morley
- “A library is a place where you can lose your innocence without losing your morality.” –Anonymous
- “Read. Read. Read. Just don’t read one type of book. Read different books by various authors so that you develop different style.”―R.L. Stine
- “A book is a dream that you hold in your hands.”―Neil Gaiman
- “The ability to read awoke inside of me some long dormant craving to be mentally alive.”―Malcolm X
- “Reading is an intellectual collision with minds greater than our own.”―Anonymous
- “When I have a house of my own, I shall be miserable if I have not an excellent library.”―Jane Austen
- “Unlike television, every book opens up new worlds that can be explored at our leisure and discretion.”―Anonymous
- “A great book should leave you with many experiences, and slightly exhausted. You should live several lives while reading it.”—William Styron
- “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
- “When I open a book I open my heart and soul, too.”―Anonymous
- “I am an omnivorous reader with a strangely retentive memory for trifles.”―Arthur Conan Doyle
- “No two persons ever read the same book.”―Edmund Wilson
- “Literature is the most agreeable way of ignoring life.”—Fernando Pessoa
- “The story is truly finished – and meaning is made – not when the author adds the last period, but when the reader enters.”―Celeste Ng
- “A good library will never be too neat, or too dusty, because somebody will always be in it, taking books off the shelves and staying up late reading them.”—Lemony Snicket
- “Books stretch your limits, they make you think bigger and wider than ever before.”―Anonymous
- “In principle and reality, libraries are life-enhancing palaces of wonder.”―Gail Honeyman
- “Books are like little worlds that live between the pages.”―Anonymous
- “When I am dead, I hope it may be said: His sins were scarlet, but his books were read.”—Hilaire Belloc
- “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.”—CS Lewis
- ”Words on paper can be just as powerful as any image or artwork.”—Anonymous
- “When I look back, I am so impressed again with the life-giving power of literature.”―Maya Angelou
- “Good friends, good books and a sleepy conscience: this is the ideal life.”―Mark Twain
- “Books may well be the only true magic.”—Alice Hoffman
- “Fiction reveals truth that reality obscures.”―Ralph Waldo Emerson
- “If you would tell me the heart of a man, tell me not what he reads, but what he rereads.”—Francois Mauriac
- “If there’s a book that you want to read, but it hasn’t been written yet, then you must write it.”—Toni Morrison
- “The problem with books is that they end.”―Caroline Kepnes
- “When I get a little money I buy books; and if any is left I buy food and clothes.”—Desiderius Erasmus
- “Sometimes, you read a book and it fills you with this weird evangelical zeal, and you become convinced that the shattered world will never be put back together unless and until all living humans read the book.”—John Green
- “She read books as one would breathe air, to fill up and live.”—Annie Dillard
- “A well-read woman is a dangerous creature.”―Lisa Kleypas
- “A person who doesn’t read has no advantage over one who can’t read.”―Mark Twain
- “Books, I found, had the power to make time stand still, retreat or fly into the future.”—Jim Bishop
- “It is well known that reading quickens the growth of a heart like nothing else.”―Catherynne M. Valente
- “Maybe it’s possible to have more than one home. Maybe it’s possible to belong in a hundred different ways to a hundred different people and places.”―Emily Henry
- “Life without books would be like a summer without ice cream – so terribly boring!”―Anonymous
- “It’s not hoarding if it’s books―it’s collecting!”―Anonymous
- “Reading is an active, imaginative act; it takes work.”―Khaled Hosseini
- “That’s the thing about books. They let you travel without moving your feet.”—Jhumpa Lahiri
- “I have always imagined that Paradise will be a kind of library.”―Jorge Luis Borges
- “No matter how many times you read a good book, it will always surprise you with something new.”―Anonymous
- “I love the solitude of reading. I love the deep dive into someone else’s story, the delicious ache of a last page.”―Naomi Shihab Nye
- “People say that life is the thing, but I prefer reading.”—Logan Pearsall Smith
- “I’m not a bookworm, I’m a book dragon!”―Anonymous
- “A book is like a garden carried in your pocket.”―Chinese Proverb
- “Books don’t offer real escape, but they can stop a mind scratching itself raw.”―David Mitchell
- “A love of reading shows empathy, the desire to understand how others live or act or might act—and why.”—Celeste Ng
- “Books help you discover things about yourself that you didn’t know before.”―Anonymous
- “A book is a device to ignite the imagination.”―Alan Bennet
- “Reading one book is like eating one potato chip.”―Diane Duane
- “The things I want to know are in books; my best friend is the man who’ll get me a book I ain’t read.”—Abraham Lincoln
- “I met all my favorite boyfriends in books.”―Anonymous
- “Once I began to read, I began to exist. I am what I read.”―Walter Dean Myers
- “I know some who are constantly drunk on books as other men are drunk on whiskey.”—H.L. Mencken
- “Reading good books ruins you for enjoying bad books.”—Mary Ann Shaffer
- “Reading should not be presented to children as a chore or duty. It should be offered to them as a precious gift.”—Kate DiCamillo
- “No. I can survive well enough on my own — if given the proper reading material.”―Sarah J. Maas
- “A room without books is like a body without a soul.”—Marcus Tullius Cicero
- “A good book has no ending.”―R. D. Cumming
- “We lose ourselves in books; we find ourselves there too.”―Anonymous
Check out this video of book lover quotes:
- “I read a book one day and my whole life was changed.”―Orhan Pamuk
- “Books may well be the only true magic.”―Alice Hoffman
- “A book, too, can be a star, a living fire to lighten the darkness, leading out into the expanding universe.”—Madeleine L’Engle
- “If one cannot enjoy reading a book over and over again, there is no use in reading it at all.”―Oscar Wilde
- “Until I feared I would lose it, I never loved to read. One does not love breathing.”―Harper Lee
- “There is more treasure in books than in all the pirate’s loot on Treasure Island.”—Walt Disney
- “You can never get a cup of tea large enough or a book long enough to suit me.”—C.S. Lewis
- “I believe there is power in words, power in asserting our existence, our experience, our lives, through words.”―Jesmyn Ward
- “In the case of good books, the point is not to see how many of them you can get through, but how many can get through to you.”—Mortimer Adler
- “A house without books is like a room without windows – no light; all dark inconclusiveness.”―Henry Ward Beecher
- “It’s incredibly easy to slip away into another world with a book firmly in your grasp.”―Darren Shan
- “To learn to read is to light a fire; every syllable that is spelled out Is a spark.”―Victor Hugo
- “The love of learning, the sequestered nooks, And all the sweet serenity of books.”―Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
- “Libraries will get you through times of no money better than money will get you through times of no libraries.”―Anne Herbert
- “My alma mater was books, a good library… I could spend the rest of my life reading, just satisfying my curiosity.”―Malcolm X
- “You don’t have to burn books to destroy a culture. Just get people to stop reading them.”―Ray Bradbury
- “A reader lives a thousand lives before he dies… The man who never reads lives only one.”―George R.R. Martin
- “But for my own part, if a book is well written, I always find it too short.”—Jane Austen
- “I love the sound of the pages flicking against my fingers. Print against fingerprints. Books make people quiet, yet they are so loud.”―Nnedi Okorafor
- “Books are a uniquely portable magic.”—Stephen King
Final Thoughts: Best Book Lover Quotes
If you like reading (of course you do, you’re reading these quotes), then you might enjoy starting a book blog.
Or being an “alpha reader” for a writer.
If so, check out the articles I handpicked for you below.
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