Quotations: Reading Books

AcceptanceQuotations ListedRelated Pages6 Groups of Topics10 Skills & Topics

Reading Books Improves Life Skills


Reading books provides the opportunity to improve your knowledge and understanding of any subject. Reading challenging and diverse books is perhaps the finest way to improve your mind.



“You have to accept whatever comes, and the only important thing is that you meet it with courage and with the best that you have to give.” —Eleanor Roosevelt


  • Read and master the life skill of acceptance using the best combination of CBT, REBT, & Stoicism.

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Quotations Various Sources

Listed Alphabetically

“A book is a bridge between generations and across cultures, a force for creating and sharing knowledge.” —UNESCO
“A book is a gift you can open again and again.” —Garrison Keillor
“A children’s story that can only be enjoyed by children is not a good children’s story in the slightest.” —C.S. Lewis
“A reader lives a thousand lives before he dies . . . The man who never reads lives only one.” —George R.R. Martin
“A room without books is like a body without a soul.” —Cicero
“A classic is a book that has never finished saying what it has to say.” —Italo Calvino
“A room without books is like a body without a soul.” —Cicero
“Ah, how good it is to be among people who are reading.” —Rainer Maria Rilke
“Always read something that will make you look good if you die in the middle of it.” —P.J. O’Rourke
“Beware of the person of one book.” —Thomas Aquinas
“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
“Books are not made for furniture, but there is nothing else that so beautifully furnishes a house.” —Henry Ward Beecher
“Books break the shackles of time – proof that humans can work magic.” —Carl Sagan
“Books serve to show a man that those original thoughts of his aren’t very new after all.” —Abraham Lincoln
“Books to the ceiling, Books to the sky, My pile of books is a mile high. How I love them! How I need them! I’ll have a long beard by the time I read them.” —Arnold Lobel
“Children are made readers on the laps of their parents.” —Emilie Buchwald
“‘Classic’ – a book which people praise and don’t read.” —Mark Twain
“Despite the enormous quantity of books, how few people read! And if one reads profitably, one would realize how much stupid stuff the vulgar herd is content to swallow every day.” —Voltaire
“Employ your time in improving yourself by other men’s writings, so that you shall gain easily what others have labored hard for.” —Socrates
“Fill your house with stacks of books, in all the crannies and all the nooks.” —Dr. Seuss
“Finally, from so little sleeping and so much reading, his brain dried up and he went completely out of his mind.” —Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
“Fools have a habit of believing that everything written by a famous author is admirable. For my part I read only to please myself and like only what suits my taste.” —Voltaire
“For my whole life, my favorite activity was reading. It’s not the most social pastime.” —Audrey Hepburn
“From the reading of ‘good books’ there comes a richness of life that can be obtained in no other way.” —Gordon B. Hinckley
“How many a man has dated a new era in his life from the reading of a book.” —Henry David Thoreau
“I always read. You know how sharks have to keep swimming or they die? I’m like that. If I stop reading, I die.” —Patrick Rothfuss
“I can’t imagine a man really enjoying a book and reading it only once.” —C.S. Lewis
“I cannot live without books: but fewer will suffice where amusement, and not use, is the only future object.” —Thomas Jefferson
“I couldn’t live a week without a private library–indeed, I’d part with all my furniture and squat and sleep on the floor before I’d let go of the 1500 or so books I possess.” —H.P. Lovecraft
“I declare after all there is no enjoyment like reading! How much sooner one tires of anything than of a book!—When I have a house of my own, I shall be miserable if I have not an excellent library.” —Jane Austen
“I find television very educating. Every time somebody turns on the set, I go into the other room and read a book.” —Groucho Marx
“I guess there are never enough books.” —John Steinbeck
“I have a passion for teaching kids to become readers, to become comfortable with a book, not daunted. Books shouldn’t be daunting, they should be funny, exciting and wonderful; and learning to be a reader gives a terrific advantage.” —Roald Dahl
“I have always imagined Paradise as a kind of library.” —Jorge Luis Borges
“I kept always two books in my pocket, one to read, one to write in.” —Robert Louis Stevenson
“I intend to put up with nothing that I can put down.” —Edgar Allan Poe
“I think books are like people, in the sense that they’ll turn up in your life when you most need them.” —Emma Thompson
“I took a speed-reading course and read War and Peace in twenty minutes. It involves Russia.” —Woody Allen
“If we encounter a man of rare intellect, we should ask him what books he reads.” —Ralph Waldo Emerson
“If you are going to get anywhere in life you have to read a lot of books.” —Roald Dahl
“If you don’t like to read, you haven’t found the right book.” —J.K. Rowling
“I’m old-fashioned and think that reading books is the most glorious pastime that humankind has yet devised.” —Wisława Szymborska
“In the case of good books, the point is not to see how many of them you can get through, but rather how many can get through to you.” —Mortimer J. Adler
“It is a great thing to start life with a small number of really good books which are your very own.” —Arthur Conan Doyle
“It’s not that I don’t like people. It’s just that when I’m in the company of others – even my nearest and dearest – there always comes a moment when I’d rather be reading a book.” —Maureen Corrigan
“Let’s be reasonable and add an eighth day to the week that is devoted exclusively to reading.” —Lena Dunham
“Libraries will get you through times of no money better than money will get you through times of no libraries.” —Anne Herbert
“Luckily, I always travel with a book, just in case I have to wait on line for Santa, or some such inconvenience.” —David Levithan
“Make it a rule never to give a child a book you would not read yourself.” —George Bernard Shaw
“Man reading should be man intensely alive. The book should be a ball of light in one’s hand.” —Ezra Pound
“Many people, myself among them, feel better at the mere sight of a book.” —Jane Smiley
“My alma mater was books, a good library…. I could spend the rest of my life reading, just satisfying my curiosity.” —Malcolm X
“Never put off till tomorrow the book you can read today.” —Holbrook Jackson
“Never trust anyone who has not brought a book with them.” —Lemony Snicket
“No. I can survive well enough on my own—if given the proper reading material.” —Sarah J. Maas
“No entertainment is so cheap as reading, nor any pleasure so lasting.” —Mary Wortley Montagu
“Of course anyone who truly loves books buys more of them than he or she can hope to read in one fleeting lifetime. A good book, resting unopened in its slot on a shelf, full of majestic potentiality, is the most comforting sort of intellectual wallpaper.” —David Quammen
“Oh, magic hour, when a child first knows she can read printed words!” —Betty Smith
“Once you learn to read, you will be forever free.” —Frederick Douglas
“One glance at a book and you hear the voice of another person, perhaps someone dead for 1,000 years. To read is to voyage through time.” —Carl Sagan
“Outside of a dog, a book is a man’s best friend. Inside of a dog, it’s too dark to read.” —Groucho Marx
“Rainy days should be spent at home with a cup of tea and a good book.” —Bill Watterson
“One sheds one’s sicknesses in books—repeats and presents again one’s emotions, to be master of them.” —D. H. Lawrence
“Read the best books first, or you may not have a chance to read them at all.” —Henry David Thoreau
“Reading brings us unknown friends” —Honoré de Balzac
“Reading is a basic tool in the living of a good life.” —Mortimer J. Adler
“Reading is a discount ticket to everywhere.” —Mary Schmich
“Reading is essential for those who seek to rise above the ordinary.” —Jim Rohn
“Reading is an exercise in empathy; an exercise in walking in someone else’s shoes for a while.” —Malorie Blackman
“Reading should not be presented to children as a chore or a duty. It should be offered as a gift.” —Kate DiCamillo
“Show me a family of readers, and I will show you the people who move the world.” —Napoléon Bonaparte
“So please, oh please, we beg, we pray, go throw your TV set away, and in its place, you can install a lovely bookshelf on the wall.” —Roald Dahl
“Some books leave us free and some books make us free.” —Ralph Waldo Emerson
“Somebody who only reads newspapers and at best books of contemporary authors looks to me like an extremely near-sighted person who scorns eyeglasses. He is completely dependent on the prejudices and fashions of his times since he never gets to see or hear anything else.” —Albert Einstein
“That perfect tranquility of life, which is nowhere to be found but in retreat, a faithful friend and a good library.” —Aphra Behn
“That’s the thing about books. They let you travel without moving your feet.” —Jhumpa Lahiri
“The man who does not read good books is no better than the man who can’t.” —Mark Twain
“The more that you read, the more things you will know. The more that you learn, the more places you’ll go.” —Dr. Seuss
“The person who deserves most pity is a lonesome one on a rainy day who doesn’t know how to read.” —Benjamin Franklin
“The reading of all good books is like a conversation with the finest (people) of the past centuries.” —Descartes
“There are many little ways to enlarge your child’s world. Love of books is the best of all.” —Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis
“There are worse crimes than burning books. One of them is not reading them.” —Joseph Brodsky
“There is more treasure in books than in all the pirate’s loot on Treasure Island.” —Walt Disney
“There is no Frigate like a Book To take us Lands away” —Emily Dickinson
“There is nothing more luxurious than eating while you read—unless it be reading while you eat.” —E. Nesbit
“These books gave Matilda a hopeful and comforting message: You are not alone.” —Roald Dahl
“To acquire the habit of reading is to construct for yourself a refuge from almost all the miseries of life.” —W. Somerset Maugham
“To learn to read is to light a fire; every syllable that is spelled out is a spark.” —Victor Hugo
“Today a reader, tomorrow a leader.” —Margaret Fuller
“We are of opinion that instead of letting books grow moldy behind an iron grating, far from the vulgar gaze, it is better to let them wear out by being read.” —Jules Verne
“Wear the old coat and buy the new book.” —Austin Phelps
“What an astonishing thing a book is. It’s a flat object made from a tree with flexible parts on which are imprinted lots of funny dark squiggles. But one glance at it and you’re inside the mind of another person, maybe somebody dead for thousands of years. Across the millennia, an author is speaking clearly and silently inside your head, directly to you. Writing is perhaps the greatest of human inventions, binding together people who never knew each other, citizens of distant epochs. Books break the shackles of time. A book is proof that humans are capable of working magic.” —Carl Sagan
“What better occupation, really, than to spend the evening at the fireside with a book, with the wind beating on the windows and the lamp burning bright.” —Gustave Flaubert
“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
“Writing is perhaps the greatest of human inventions.” —Carl Sagan
“You can never get a cup of tea large enough or a book long enough to suit me.” —C.S. Lewis
“You don’t have to burn books to destroy a culture. Just get people to stop reading them.” —Ray Bradbury
“You know you’ve read a good book when you turn the last page and feel a little as if you have lost a friend.” —Paul Sweeney
“You may have tangible wealth untold. Caskets of jewels and coffers of gold. Richer than I you can never be — I had a mother who read to me.” —Strickland Gillilan
“You’re never too old, too wacky, too wild to pick up a book and read to a child.” —Anita Merina


  • Read and master the life skill of acceptance using the best combination of CBT, REBT, & Stoicism.

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  • Read and discover how CBT, REBT, & Stoicism evolved into one system: STPHFR.

Stiffer Stoic Mind


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Breathe Your Mind

9 Skills & Topics Menu


  • Read and discover how CBT, REBT, & Stoicism evolved into one system: STPHFR.

Stiffer Stoic Mind


  • Read and discover the world’s best breathing exercise for centering and peace of mind.

Breathe Your Mind