Literature Quotes

Take the time to discover how African-Americans have had a great impact on this country. In science, education, literature, art, and politics.

Sabbath - a weekly festival having its origin in the fact that God made the world in six days and was arrested on the seventh.

Oceania was at war with Eurasia; therefore Oceania had always been at war with Eurasia.

What is lost in the good or excellent translation is precisely the best.

The curse of Scottish literature is the lack of a whole language, which finally means the lack of a whole mind.

Language also encodes our past. We want to know who we are. To know who we are, we have to know who we used to be. Consequently, our literature, written in the past, anchors us in that past.

Progress and reaction have both turned out to be swindles. Seemingly, there is nothing left but quietism - robbing reality of its terrors by simply submitting to it.

When you deal with your brother, be pleasant, but get a witness.

Set religion free, and a new humanity will begin.

If I play hard to get, soon the phone stops ringing altogether.

Our true nature is free of any and all notions of gender, of any notions of difference whatsoever.

The Old Testament, as everyone who has looked into it is aware, drips with blood; there is, indeed, no more bloody chronicle in all the literature of the world.

No exile at the South Pole or on the summit of Mont Blanc separates us more effectively from others than the practice of a hidden vice.

In order to shake a hypothesis, it is sometimes not necessary to do anything more than push it as far as it will go.

Biologically the species is the accumulation of the experiments of all its successful individuals since the beginning.

A friend is worth all hazards we can run.

In fact I am quite snappy and irritable, and I don't know if I'd like to make myself worse in that respect.

Nixon had some large achievements in foreign affairs. They will be remembered. But a president probably gets remembered for one thing, and Watergate will head the Nixon list, I suspect.

What is literature, really? Boiled down to a single sentence, I'd say it's this: an endless conversation about what it means to be human. And to read literature is to engage in that conversation.

When a book, any sort of book, reaches a certain intensity of artistic performance it becomes literature.

[Science is] the literature of truth.

Modern American cinema seems to me superficial. The intention is to understand a certain reality, and the result is nothing but a photographing of that reality.

By being faithful in that which is another man's, it qualifies you for that which is your own.

Historians of literature like to regard a century as a series of ten faces, each grimacing in a different way.

The essayist has to follow a certain intellectual pattern. The novelist has the advantage of using fantasy, of being subjective.

Poets are always the advance guard of literature; the advance guard of life. It is for this reason that their recognition comes so slowly.

There never was and is not likely soon to be a nation of philosophers, nor am I certain it is desirable that there should be.

One of our problems today is that we are not well acquainted with the literature of the spirit. We re interested in the news of the day and the problems of the hour.

We trifle when we assign limits to our desires, since nature hath set none.

What frightens us most in a madman is his sane conversation.

History without politics descends to mere Literature.

Privacy under what circumstance? Privacy at home under what circumstances? You have more privacy if everyone's illiterate, but you wouldn't really call that privacy. That's ignorance.

Of all the sexual aberrations, chastity is the strangest.

Persecution mania is still around. In your writing, in your exchanges with people, meeting people who are in Russian affairs, Russian literature, etcetera.

Of all the ways of defining man, the worst is the one which makes him out to be a rational animal.

Dickens is one of those authors who are well worth stealing.

I hate vulgar realism in literature. The man who would call a spade a spade should be compelled to use one.

To the real artist in humanity, what are called bad manners are often the most picturesque and significant of all.

Oh! Do not attack me with your watch. A watch is always too fast or too slow. I cannot be dictated to by a watch.

If we have no heretics we must invent them, for heresy is essential to health and growth.

To accomplish the perfect perfection, a little imperfection helps.

History will be erased in the universal purgatory.

Literature can remind us that not all life is already written down: there are still so many stories to be told.

I begin with writing the first sentence—and trusting to Almighty God for the second.

The most complicated skill is to be simple.

How keen everyone is to make this world their home forgetting its impermanence It's like trying to see and name constellations in a fireworks display.

To hide feelings when you are near crying is the secret of dignity.

Before the first before and after the last after, there is night waiting.

Possible is more a matter of attitude, A matter of decision, to choose Among the impossible possibilities, When one sound opportunity Becomes a possible solution.

Digressions are part of harmony, deviations too.