50 Quotes All Book Lovers Can Relate To

Updated: Aug. 02, 2023

Calling all literary lovers: these quotes are for you!

Book lover quotes that speak to your soul

Books are truly some of the best joys in life. They allow us to escape reality and get lost in fantastic tales, even if only for a little while. Book lovers know the power of a good book—you can’t put it down, recommend it to everyone you know, and put in on your personal list of books everyone should read in their lifetime. There are plenty of uplifting quotes that come from books, and you may even have your favorite quotes from books memorized. These quotes would also be great to accompany any of these gifts for book lovers (that aren’t books). There’s power behind these quotes, especially quotes that pertain to a love of books and reading. Here are some of the best book lover quotes for all the proud bookworms out there.

1. “We live for books.”―Umberto Eco

2. “There is no friend as loyal as a book.”—Ernest Hemingway

3. “That I can read and be happy while I am reading, is a great blessing.”—Anthony Trollope

4. “I look at books as being a form of activism. Sometimes they’ll show us a side of the world that we might not have known about.”—Angie Thomas

5. “Reading is to the mind what exercise is to the body.”—Joseph Addison

6. “There is no substitute for books in the life of a child.”—Mary Ellen Chase

7. “The reading of all good books is like a conversation with the finest minds of past centuries.”—Rene Descartes

8. “There are worse crimes than burning books. One of them is not reading them.”–Ray Bradbury 

9. “I have always imagined that Paradise will be a kind of library.”—Jorge Luis Borges

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

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jk Rowling quoterd.com

11. “There’s always room for a story that can transport people to another place.”—J.K. Rowling

12. “People can lose their lives in libraries. They ought to be warned.”—Saul Bellow

13. “I am a part of everything I have read.”—Theodore Roosevelt

14. “What a blessing it is to love books.”—Elizabeth von Arnim, The Solitary Summer

15. “Reading is an exercise in empathy; an exercise in walking in someone else’s shoes for a while.”—Malorie Blackman

16. “Some like to believe it’s the book that chooses the person.”—Carlos Ruiz Zafón

17. “I have never known any distress that an hour’s reading did not relieve.”—Montesquieu

18. “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 

19. “If there’s a book that you want to read, but it hasn’t been written yet, then you must write it.”—Toni Morrison

20. “… a mind needs books as a sword needs a whetstone, if it is to keep its edge.”—George R.R. Martin, A Game of Thrones

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Mark Twain quote with open bookrd.com, Getty Images

21. “Good friends, good books and a sleepy conscience: this is the ideal life.”—Mark Twain

22. “Books are the carriers of civilization. Without books, history is silent, literature dumb, science crippled, thought and speculation at a standstill.”—Barbara W. Tuchman

23. “Read. Read. Read. Just don’t read one type of book. Read different books by various authors so that you develop different styles.”—R.L. Stein

24. “We shouldn’t teach great books; we should teach a love of reading.”—B.F. Skinner

25. “Books are a uniquely portable magic.”—Stephen King

26. “But for my own part, if a book is well written, I always find it too short.”—Jane Austen

27. “Reading is a conversation. All books talk. But a good book listens as well.”—Mark Haddon

28. “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

29. “There is more treasure in books than in all the pirate’s loot on Treasure Island.”—Walt Disney

30. “A book, too, can be a star, a living fire to lighten the darkness, leading out into the expanding universe.”—Madeleine L’Engle

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Marcus Tullius Cicero quoterd.com

31. “A room without books is like a body without a soul.”—Marcus Tullius Cicero

32. “I know some who are constantly drunk on books as other men are drunk on whiskey.”—H.L. Mencken

33. “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

34. “A love of reading shows empathy, the desire to understand how others live or act or might act—and why.”—Celeste Ng

35. “People say that life is the thing, but I prefer reading.”—Logan Pearsall Smith

36. “That’s the thing about books. They let you travel without moving your feet.”—Jhumpa Lahiri, The Namesake

37. “The world was hers for the reading.”—Betty Smith, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn

38. “Books, I found, had the power to make time stand still, retreat or fly into the future.”—Jim Bishop

39. “She read books as one would breathe air, to fill up and live.”—Annie Dillard, The Living

40. “If you would tell me the heart of a man, tell me not what he reads, but what he rereads.”—Francois Mauriac

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Alice Hoffman quote with stack of booksrd.com, Getty Images

41. “Books may well be the only true magic.”—Alice Hoffman

42. “When I am dead, I hope it may be said: His sins were scarlet, but his books were read.”—Hilaire Belloc 

43. “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, Horseradish

44. “Literature is the most agreeable way of ignoring life.”—Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet

45. “A great book should leave you with many experiences, and slightly exhausted. You should live several lives while reading it.”—William Styron

46. “There is no mistaking a real book when one meets it. It is like falling in love.”—Christopher Morley, Pipefuls

47. “There are many little ways to enlarge your child’s world. Love of books is the best of all.”—Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis

48. “There are no faster or firmer friendships than those formed between people who love the same books.”—Irving Stone, Clarence Darrow for the Defense

49. “So many books, so little time.”—Frank Zappa

50. “Reading is a basic tool in the living of a good life.”—Joseph Addison

Itching for a new book after reading these quotes? Learn the best places to find used books online—you’ll save money while expanding your library.