World Book Day Quotes, Because We Are Who We Read

April 23 is the World Book Day, a global celebration of books, authors and reading. Here's a look at 63 amazing quotes on the joy of reading. What are you reading these days? And what's the one book you love to share or gift? Go, go on and share what you feel. Until then look at SheThePeople's picks of the best book quotes and get inspired.

A book is a device to ignite the imagination. - Alan Bennett

A great book should leave you with many experiences, and slightly exhausted at the end. You live several lives while reading. - William StyronA book is a dream that you hold in your hand. – Neil Gaiman

Picture Credit: Pervin Saket

A book is the only place in which you can examine a fragile thought without breaking it, or explore an explosive idea without fear it will go off in your face. - Edward P. Morgan

Not all who wander are lost - JRR Tolkien

A book must be an ice-axe to break the seas frozen inside our soul. - Franz Kafka

A bookstore is one of the only pieces of evidence we have that people are still thinking. - Jerry Seinfield

A good book is the precious lifeblood of a master spirit. - John Milton

A house without books is like a room without windows. - Heinrich Mann

A mind needs books as a sword needs a whetstone, if it is to keep its edge. - George R.R. Martin

A writer only begins a book. A reader finishes it. - Samuel Johnson

Always read something that will make you look good if you die in the middle of it. - P. J. O'Rourke

Be careful about reading health books. Some fine day you'll die of a misprint. - Markus Herz

Books - the best antidote against the marsh-gas of boredom and vacuity. - George Steiner

Books are a uniquely portable magic. - Stephen King

A first book has some of the sweetness of a first love. - Robert Aris Willmott

Books are lighthouses erected in the great sea of time. - E.P. Whipple

Books are not made for furniture, but there is nothing else that so beautifully furnishes a house. - Henry Ward Beecher

Books are the bees which carry the quickening pollen from one to another mind. - James Russell Lowell

Books are the compasses and telescopes and sextants and charts which other men have prepared to help us navigate the dangerous seas of human life. - Jesse Lee Bennett

Books are the plane, and the train, and the road. They are the destination, and the journey. They are home. - Anna Quindlen

A good book has no ending. - R.D. Cumming

Books are the quietest and most constant of friends; they are the most accessible and wisest of counsellors, and the most patient of teachers. - Charles William Eliot

Books had instant replay long before televised sports. - Bern Williams

Books let us into their souls and lay open to us the secrets of our own. - William Hazlitt

Books were my pass to personal freedom. - Oprah Winfrey

Children are made readers on the laps of their parents. - Emilie Buchwald

Education is not the filling of a pail, but the lighting of a fire. - W. B. Yeats

Fiction reveals truths that reality obscures. - Jessamyn West

Good as it is to inherit a library, it is better to collect one. - Augustine Birrell

Good friends, good books, and a sleepy conscience: this is the ideal life. - Mark Twain

Until I feared I would lose it, I never loved to read. One does not love breathing. – Harper Lee

Having your book turned into a movie is like seeing your oxen turned into bouillon cubes. - John LeCarre

I find television to be very educating. Every time somebody turns on the set, I go in the other room and read a book. - Groucho Marx

If you don’t like to read, you haven’t found the right book. – J.K. Rowling

I have always imagined that Paradise will be a kind of library. - Jorge Luis Borges

I was born with a reading list I will never finish. - Maud Casey

I’ve never known any trouble that an hour’s reading didn’t assuage. - Charles de Secondat

If there's a book that you want to read, but it hasn't been written yet, then you must write it. - Toni Morrison

If we encounter a man of rare intellect, we should ask him what books he reads. – Ralph Waldo Emerson

If you only read the books that everyone else is reading, you can only think what everyone else is thinking. - Haruki Murakami

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

It often requires more courage to read some books than it does to fight a battle. - Sutton Elbert Griggs

My best friend is the man who'll get me a book I ain't read. - Abraham Lincoln

Reading is escape, and the opposite of escape. - Nora Ephron

My test of a good novel is dreading to begin the last chapter. - Thomas Helm

Never judge a book by its movie. - J.W. Eagan

Never lend books, for no one ever returns them; the only books I have in my library are books that other folks have lent me. - Anatole France

No matter how busy you may think you are, you must find time for reading, or surrender yourself to self-chosen ignorance. - Confucius

Whenever you read a good book, somewhere in the world a door opens to allow in more light. –Vera Nazarian

Not all readers are leaders, but all leaders are readers. - Harry S. Truman

Once you learn to read, you will be forever free. - Frederick Douglass

One of the joys of reading is the ability to plug into the shared wisdom of mankind. - Ishmael Reed

Reading is to the mind, what exercise is to the body. - Joseph Addison

Reading means borrowing. - Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

So many books, so little time. - Frank Zappa

The person, be it gentleman or lady, who has not pleasure in a good novel, must be intolerably stupid. - Jane Austen

The wise man reads both books and life itself. - Lin Yutang

The world of books is the most remarkable creation of man. - Clarence Shepard Day

There are many little ways to enlarge your child's world. Love of books is the best of all. - Jacqueline Kennedy

There is no friend as loyal as a book. - Ernest Hemingway

Books are a uniquely portable magic. – Stephen King

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