80+ Quotes About Books With a Deeper Meaning

Books are one of the most powerful things on the planet. Hidden beneath the pieces of paper, there are thousands of stories waiting to be discovered. Even though fewer people read now because of technology, books let us escape into magical worlds. They make us feel like we’re living many lives while we’re just cozy in bed. Check out our favorite quotes about books to get some new inspiration.

Reading gives us the ability to live multiple lives at once.

• “There is more treasure in books than in all the pirate’s loot on Treasure Island.” — Walt Disney
• “Good friends, good books, and a sleepy conscience: this is the ideal life.”- Mark Twain
• “If you only read the books that everyone else is reading, you can only think what everyone else is thinking.” -Haruki Murakami, Norwegian Wood
• “Books are the mirrors of the soul.” — Virginia Woolf
• “If one cannot enjoy reading a book over and over again, there is no use in reading it at all.” — Oscar Wilde
• “There is no friend as loyal as a book.”- Ernest Hemingway
• “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 books that the world calls immoral are books that show the world its own shame.”
  — Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray
• “Books are a uniquely portable magic.” — Stephen King, On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft
• “You have to write the book that wants to be written. And if the book will be too difficult for grown-ups, then you write it for children.” — Madeleine L’Engle
• “A great book should leave you with many experiences, and slightly exhausted at the end. You live several lives while reading.” — William Styron, Conversations with William Styron
• “A book is a gift you can open again and again.” — Garrison Keillor
• “If a book is well written, I always find it too short.” — Jane Austen
• “A room without books is like a body without a soul.” — Cicero
• “I think books are like people, in the sense that they’ll turn up in your life when you most need them.” — Emma Thompson
• “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
• “You will learn most things by looking, but reading gives understanding. Reading will make you free.” — Paul Rand
• “Today a reader, tomorrow a leader.” — Margaret Fuller
• “Reading is to the mind what exercise is to the body.” — Joseph Addison

The best memories are stored between the pages of a book.

• “One of the many gifts that books give readers is a connection to each other. When we share an affection for a writer, an author or a story, we also have a better understanding of people unlike ourselves. Books cultivate empathy.” — Sarah Jessica Parker
• “Do not read, as children do, to amuse yourself, or like the ambitious, for the purpose of instruction. No, read in order to live.” — Gustave Flaubert
• “In a good bookroom you feel in some mysterious way that you are absorbing the wisdom contained in all the books through your skin, without even opening them.” — Mark Twain
• “Books are like mirrors: if a fool looks in, you cannot expect a genius to look out.” — J.K. Rowling
• “Picking five favorite books is like picking the five body parts you’d most like not to lose.” — Neil Gaiman
• “Honesty is the first chapter of the book wisdom.” — Thomas Jefferson
• “Books make great gifts because they have whole worlds inside of them. And it’s much cheaper to buy somebody a book than it is to buy them the whole world!” — Neil Gaiman
• “Fiction reveals truth that reality obscures.” — Jessamyn West
• “Books are the plane, and the train, and the road. They are the destination, and the journey. They are home.” — Anna Quindlen
• “I read a book one day and my whole life was changed.” — Orhan Pamuk, The New Life
• “Not all readers are leaders, but all leaders are readers.” — Harry Truman
• “The more that you read, the more things you will know. The more that you learn, the more places you’ll go,” — Dr. Seuss
• “Don’t give up reading, the more you practice, the easier it will get.” — unknown
• “A child who carries a book with a bookmark in it is in two places at the same time.” — Tony Abbott
• “A good book is like a good friend. It will stay with you for the rest of your life. When you first get to know it, it will give you excitement and adventure, and years later it will provide you with comfort and familiarity. And best of all, you can share it with your children or your grandchildren or anyone you love enough to let into its secrets.” — Charlie Lovett
• “Show me a family of readers, and I will show you the people who move the world.” — Napoleon Bonaparte
• “Reading should not be presented to children as a chore, a duty. It should be offered as a gift.”
  — Kate DiCamillo
• “Books are mirrors: You only see in them what you already have inside you.” — Carlos Ruiz Zafón, The Shadow of the Wind
• “If you don’t like to read, you haven’t found the right book.” — J.K. Rowling
• “Books and doors are the same thing. You open them, and you go through into another world.”
  — Jeanette Winterson
• “Once you learn to read, you will be forever free.” — Frederick Douglass
• “Literature is the safe and traditional vehicle through which we learn about the world and pass on values from one generation to the next. Books save lives.” — Laurie Anderson

Quotes about books that will make you want to read more.

• “The reading of all good books is like a conversation with the finest minds of past centuries.”
  — Rene Descartes
• “I love the way that each book — any book — is its own journey. You open it, and off you go...”
  — Sharon Creech
• “You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read. It was books that taught me that the things that tormented me most were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive, who had ever been alive.” — James Baldwin
• “It is only a novel... or, in short, only some work in which the greatest powers of the mind are displayed, in which the most thorough knowledge of human nature, the happiest delineation of its varieties, the liveliest effusions of wit and humor, are conveyed to the world in the best-chosen language” — Jane Austen
• “I have lived a thousand lives and I’ve loved a thousand loves. I’ve walked on distant worlds and seen the end of time. Because I read.” — George R.R. Martin
• “The books transported her into new worlds and introduced her to amazing people who lived exciting lives. She went on olden-day sailing ships with Joseph Conrad. She went to Africa with Ernest Hemingway and to India with Rudyard Kipling. She travelled all over the world while sitting in her little room in an English village.” — Roald Dahl, Matilda
• “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 Gissing
• “People don’t realize how a man’s whole life can be changed by one book.”
  — Malcolm X
• “The odd thing about people who had many books was how they always wanted more.”
  — Patricia A. McKillip, The Bell at Sealey Head
• “When I discovered libraries, it was like having Christmas every day.” — Jean Fritz
• “Without words, without writing and without books there would be no history, there could be no concept of humanity.” — Hermann Hesse
• “My grandma always said that God made libraries so that people didn’t have any excuse to be stupid.” — Joan Bauer, Rules of the Road
• “Read not to contradict and confute; nor to believe and take for granted; nor to find talk and discourse; but to weigh and consider. Some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested: that is, some books are to be read only in parts, others to be read, but not curiously, and some few to be read wholly, and with diligence and attention.”
  — Francis Bacon, The Essays
• “A library is a good place to go when you feel unhappy, for there, in a book, you may find encouragement and comfort. A library is a good place to go when you feel bewildered or undecided, for there, in a book, you may have your question answered. Books are good company, in sad times and happy times, for books are people — people who have managed to stay alive by hiding between the covers of a book.” — E.B. White
• “Being rich is not about how much money you have or how many homes you own; it’s the freedom to buy any book you want without looking at the price and wondering if you can afford it.” — John Waters
• “Only the ship is made of books, its sails thousands of overlapping pages, and the sea it floats upon is dark black ink.” — Erin Morgenstern
• “I know nothing in the world that has as much power as a word. Sometimes I write one, and I look at it, until it begins to shine.” — Emily Dickinson
• “When I am attacked by gloomy thoughts, nothing helps me so much as running to my books. They quickly absorb me and banish the clouds from my mind.” — Montaigne, Les Essais
• “If all printers were determined not to print anything till they were sure it would offend nobody, there would be very little printed.” — Benjamin Franklin
• “You’re never alone when you’re reading a book.” — Susan Wiggs

The power books have over us.

• “Wisdom ... comes not from age, but from education and learning.” — Anton Chekhov
• “All I have learned, I learned from books.” — Abraham Lincoln
• “In omnibus requiem quaesivi, et nusquam inveni nisi in angulo cum libro.
  (Everywhere I have sought peace and not found it, except in a corner with a book.)”
  -Thomas a Kempis
• “I love walking into a bookstore. It’s like all my friends are sitting on shelves, waving their pages at me.” — Tahereh Mafi
• “In the shop we buy and sell them, but in truth books have no owner. Every book you see here has been somebody’s best friend.” — Carlos Ruiz Zafón, The Shadow of the Wind
• “A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us.” — Franz Kafka
• “Books have a unique way of stopping time in a particular moment and saying: Let’s not forget this.” — Dave Eggers
• “Wear the old coat and buy the new book.” — Austin Phelps
• “A good book ... leaves you wanting to reread the book. A great book compels you to reread your own soul.” — Richard Flanagan, The Narrow Road to the Deep North
• “Quiet people have the loudest minds.” — Stephen King
• “Books, which we mistake for consolation, only add depth to our sorrow. ” - Orhan Pamuk, My Name Is Red
• “Reality doesn’t always give us the life that we desire, but we can always find what we desire between the pages of books.” — Adelise M. Cullens
• “Maybe this is why we read, and why in moments of darkness we return to books: to find words for what we already know.” — Alberto Manguel, A Reading Diary
• “You can get lost in any library, no matter the size. But the more lost you are, the more things you’ll find.” — Millie Florence, Lydia Green Of Mulberry Glen
• “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
• “That’s the thing about books. They let you travel without moving your feet.” — Jhumpa Lahiri, The Namesake
• “The whole world opened to me when I learned to read.” — Mary McLeod Bethune
• “A reader lives a thousand lives before he dies, said Jojen. The man who never reads lives only one.” — George R.R. Martin, A Dance with Dragons
• “Once I began to read, I began to exist. I am what I read.” — Walter Dean Myers, Open a World of Possible
• “A well-read woman is a dangerous creature.” — Lisa Kleypas, A Wallflower Christmas
• “If you only read the books that everyone else is reading, you can only think what everyone else is thinking.” — Haruki Murakami, Norwegian Wood

These quotes about books will expand your horizons.

• “Never judge someone by the way he looks or a book by the way it’s covered; for inside those tattered pages, there’s a lot to be discovered.” — Steve Cosgroves
• “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
• “An unread book does nobody any good. Stories happen in the mind of a reader, not among symbols printed on a page.” — Brandon Mull
• “Remember, the past need not become our future as well.” — Brandon Sanderson, Elantris
• “Books... are like lobster shells, we surround ourselves with ’em, then we grow out of ’em and leave ’em behind, as evidence of our earlier stages of development.” — Dorothy L. Sayers, The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club
• “You don’t put your life into your books, you find it there.” — Alan Bennett, The Uncommon Reader
• “We lose ourselves in what we read, only to return to ourselves, transformed and part of a more expansive world.” — Judith Butler
• “A book is a gift you can open again and again.” — Garrison Keillor

People who read are never alone, and having the proper books by your side can change you. Here are some books that are a must-read before turning 30! If you are already 30 and still don’t have read these books, take your chance and read them, because it is never too late for a good book!