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It’s time to use our imaginations and explore other worlds! While flights of fancy may seem frivolous, encouraging kids to read and enjoy reading is as essential as encouraging play. Having adventures in our own subconscious helps with so many aspects of development, and you’d be surprised at how many seemingly dry world leaders have famous quotes about reading, specifically reading the type of stuff that’s full of whimsy and wonder, like Thomas Jefferson, Kofi Annan, Albert Einstein, and Carl Sagan, just to name a few. Here are some famous literacy quotes and inspirational quotes for teachers who want to encourage reading habits in their young students. These quotes about the importance of reading aren’t just from educators but also from Nobel Prize winners, actors, millionaires, and, naturally, some of the greatest authors of our age. So many of these inspirational reading quotes for children highlight how important it is to have experiences outside of our own, no matter our station in life. It grows empathy, builds comprehension, and works out our minds in more creative and divergent ways.
A Note on How to Help Kids Read
Looking beyond these reading quotes, for kids, it’s even more important to enjoy reading; it shouldn’t be a punishment or something they “have” to do. If you’re wondering how to get kids to read, consider if your child is struggling with an aspect of reading, has a learning disorder like dyslexia, or has been made to feel dumb for not reading fast enough. Create a calm and rewarding environment, and let the child make independent decisions about what they want to read at their local library as well. Offer to read a book with them, or give them a special space like a reading nook!
Top Children-Reading Quotes
- “If you want your children to be intelligent, read them fairy tales. If you want them to be more intelligent, read them more fairy tales.” — Albert Einstein (famous physicist)
- “Let us remember: One book, one pen, one child, and one teacher can change the world.” — Malala Yousafzai (Nobel Prize winner)
- “There is more treasure in books than in all the pirates’ loot on Treasure Island.” — Walt Disney (businessman)
- “A library takes the gift of reading one step further by offering personalized learning opportunities second to none, a powerful antidote to the isolation of the Web.” — Julie Andrews (actor)
- “Reading makes all other learning possible. We have to get books into our children’s hands early and often.” — Barack Obama (American president)
- “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 … .” — Carl Sagan (host of the show Cosmos)
- “Though I personally will defend the value of bedtime stories to my last gasp, I have learned to value imagination in a much broader sense. Imagination is not only the uniquely human capacity to envision that which is not, and therefore the fount of all invention and innovation. In its arguably most transformative and revelatory capacity, it is the power that enables us to empathise with humans whose experiences we have never shared.” — J.K. Rowling (author of the Harry Potter series)
Watch her full commencement speech at Harvard University. - “Any book that helps a child to form a habit of reading, to make reading one of his deep and continuing needs, is good for him.” — Maya Angelou (author of I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings)
- “We all — adults and children, writers and readers — have an obligation to daydream. We have an obligation to imagine. It is easy to pretend that nobody can change anything, that we are in a world in which society is huge and the individual is less than nothing: an atom in a wall, a grain of rice in a rice field. But the truth is, individuals change their world over and over, individuals make the future, and they do it by imagining that things can be different.” — Neil Gaiman (author of Coraline)
Read his full article on libraries. - “It really makes a difference to hear stories about how someone like you can be loved. And if you don’t hear those stories, it will change who you are.” — Rebecca Sugar (creator of Steven Universe)
- “Literacy is a bridge from misery to hope. It is a tool for daily life in modern society. It is a bulwark against poverty and a building block of development … .” — Kofi Annan (past secretary-general of the UN)
Read his press release on literacy. - “To learn to read is to light a fire; every syllable that is spelled out is a spark.” — Victor Hugo (author of Hunchback of Notre Dame)
- “Comics are the gateway drug to literacy.” — Art Spiegelman (author of Maus)
- “Thus a lively and lasting sense of filial duty is more effectually impressed on the mind of a son or daughter by reading King Lear than by all the dry volumes of ethics and divinity that ever were written.” — Thomas Jefferson (American president and founding father)
- “Books showed me there were possibilities in life, that there were actually people like me living in a world I could not only aspire to but attain.” — Oprah Winfrey (businesswoman)
- “Once you learn to read, you will be forever free.” — Frederick Douglass (famous abolitionist)
- “We read fantasy to find the colors again, I think. To taste strong spices and hear the songs the sirens sang. There is something old and true in fantasy that speaks to something deep within us, to the child who dreamt that one day he would hunt the forests of the night, and feast beneath the hollow hills, and find a love to last forever somewhere south of Oz and north of Shangri-La.” — George R.R. Martin (author of A Song of Ice and Fire, aka Game of Thrones)
Read his blog post on fantasy. - “Books shouldn’t be daunting: they should be funny, exciting and wonderful. And learning to be a reader gives a terrific advantage.” — Roald Dahl (author of Matilda)
- “There are many little ways to enlarge your child’s world. Love of books is the best of all.” — Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis (American first lady)
- “Let children read whatever they want and then talk about it with them. If parents and kids can talk together, we won’t have as much censorship because we won’t have as much fear.” — Judy Blume (author of Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret.)
Find more about the author: Kim Hart
