Literature Quotes

Praise undeserved, is satire in disguise.

People do not wish to appear foolish; to avoid the appearance of foolishness, they are willing to remain actually fools.

I try to teach my heart not to want things it cant have.

There is nothing that compares to an unexpected round of applause.

Literature may open a third eye in the middle of the reader's forehead.

It is unthinkable for a Frenchman to arrive at middle age without having syphilis and the Cross of the Legion of Honor.

At first, I only laughed at myself. Then I noticed that life itself is amusing. I've been in a generally good mood ever since.

Be able to recognize many of the major constellations and know the stories behind them

Let us not be too particular; it is better to have old secondhand diamonds than none at all.

We must wash literature off ourselves. We want to be men above all, to be human.

We are prepared for insults, but compliments leave us baffled.

Good manners are appreciated as much as bad manners are abhorred.

Literature adds to reality, it does not simply describe it.

Literature is the denunciation of the times in which one lives.

We had two grand antique professors who had been teaching at Lombard since before I was born.

The present time has one advantage over every other -- it is our own.

If I need something, I'll invent it.

The whole of the Amazonian narcotic complex, as it's called in the old literature, is based on activation of DMT by one strategy or another.

I have the handicap of being born with a special language to which I alone have the key.

A fast is not a hunger strike. Fasting submits to God's commands. A hunger strike makes God submit to our demands.

The thing that is incredible is life itself. Why should we be here in this sun-illuminated universe? Why should there be green earth under our feet?

A woman will doubt everything you say except it be compliments to herself.

Don't overestimate the decency of the human race.

Mechanical difficulties with language are the outcome of internal difficulties with thought.

I am an anarchist in politics and an impressionist in art as well as a symbolist in literature. Not that I understand what these terms mean, but I take them to be all merely synonyms of pessimist.

I never smoked a cigarette until I was nine.

...I can't see either of these papers being in the next IPCC report. Kevin [Trenberth] and I will keep them out somehow, even if we have to redefine what the peer-review literature is!

There's a whole form of literature in India which talks about the quest for the perfect man by a woman, where every woman looks for a perfect man but only ends up with half that.

Its a heartening fact about the human race that utopian fiction precedes dystopian fiction in the evolution of literature.

Literature exists at the same time in the modes of error and truth; it both betrays and obeys its own mode of being.

In real terms, there is a greater disparity of earnings between the very rich and the very poor.

On winning Literature Nobel Prize: I was actually in the street. Yes, I was in the street. It was my daughter who notified me.

The English countryside, its growth and its destruction, is a genuine and tragic theme.

The simple point is that literature belongs to the world man constructs, not to the world he sees; to his home, not his environment.

The thornbush is the old obstacle in the road. It must catch fire if you want to go further.

The most prevalent poetic representation of contemporary experience is the mimesis of disorientation by non sequitor.

To see a priest making his meditation before Mass does more for an altar boy's vocation than a thousand pieces of inspirational literature.

literature is the record of our discontent.

Some may want to shout on the street, but we should tolerate those who hide in their rooms and use literature to voice their opinions.

What we call education and culture is for the most part nothing but the substitution of reading for experience, of literature for life, of the obsolete fictitious for the contemporary real.

Literature is at once the cause and the effect of social progress.

I wasn't good with authority, went to lots of schools, didn't like the fact that there was no autonomy.

Love, the quest; marriage, the conquest; divorce, the inquest.

Silence, exile, cunning and so on... it's my nature to keep quiet about most things. Even the ideas in my work.

A diary means yes indeed.

Inequality may linger in the world of material things, but great music, great literature, great art and the wonders of science are, and should be, open to all.

Of all the senses, sight must be the most delightful.

Compromise used to mean that half a loaf was better than no bread. Among modern statesmen it really seems to mean that half a loaf; is better than a whole loaf.

I do not say a proverb is amiss when aptly and reasonably applied, but to be forever discharging them, right or wrong, hit or miss, renders conversation insipid and vulgar.

Friendships are discovered rather than made.