Literature Quotes

Instead of noblemen, let us have noble villages of men.

To him who knows to prosper and does it not, to him it is sin.

There are no small churches, just small people.

Not everyone can be an orphan.

Truth never was indebted to a lie

I make it clear why I write as I do and why other poets write as they do. After hundreds of experiments I decided to go my own way in style and see what would happen.

One of the darkest evils of our world is surely the unteachable wildness of the Good.

I have been as sincere a worshipper of Aurora as the Greeks.

I couldn't see myself filling some definite niche in what is called a career. This was all misty.

In science, read, by preference, the newest works; in literature the oldest.

There was always the consolation that if I didn't like what I wrote I could throw it away or burn it.

Our unconscious is not more animal than our conscious, it is often even more human

The notion of a universality of human experience is a confidence trick and the notion of a universality of female experience is a clever confidence trick.

Platitude: an idea (a) that is admitted to be true by everyone, and (b) that is not true.

I have in later years taken to Euclid, Whitehead, Bertrand Russell, in an elemental way.

Most of what we call the classics of world literature suggest artifacts in a wax museum. We have to hire and pay professors to get them read and talked about.

Men and women should stay apart, till their hearts grow gentle towards one another again.

Evil is always possible. Goodness is a difficulty.

The American landscape has no foreground and the American mind no background.

I have never known a novel that was good enough to be good in spite of its being adapted to the author's political views.

Literature is a toil and a snare, a curse that bites deep.

...every literature, in its main lines, reflects the chief characteristics of the people for whom, and about whom, it is written.

I have never believed that the critic is the rival of the poet, but I do believe that criticism is a genre of literature or it does not exist.

Loud peace propaganda makes war seem imminent.

Common sense is compelled to make its way without the enthusiasm of anyone.

But better die than live mechanically a life that is a repetition of repetitions.

The farther a society progresses, the more clearly the individual becomes the antithesis of the group.

But nothing in India is identifiable, the mere asking of a question causes it to disappear or to merge in something else.

One marvels why the middle classes still insist on so much discomfort for their children at such expense to themselves.

The first phase of American political history was characterized by the conflict between the Federalists and the Republicans, and it resulted in the complete triumph of the latter.

So far I, at least, have no fault to find with implications of Hamilton's Federalism, but unfortunately his policy was in certain other respects tainted with a more doubtful tendency.

The only fruitful promise of which the life of any individual or any nation can be possessed, is a promise determined by an ideal.

There is something majestic in the bad taste of Italy.

Unless the great majority of Americans not only have, but believe they have, a fair chance, the better American future will be dangerously compromised.

Poverty, to be picturesque, should be rural. Suburban misery is as hideous as it is pitiable.

I am certainly an ought and not a must.

Performing doesn't turn me on. It's an egomaniac business, filled with prima donnas - including this one.

Love and understand the Italians, for the people are more marvellous than the land.

I don't back down. I don't cave when the pressure gets too great from these partisan political ideological forces.

Cham is the only thing to screw one up when one is down a peg.

Justice is the first virtue of those who command, and stops the complaints of those who obey.

No man can understand why a woman shouldn't prefer a good reputation to a good time.

Even now there is no evidence that anyone involved in the Nixon operation was going to threaten us.

Way before Watergate, senior administration officials hid behind anonymity.

As one who loves literature, art, music and history, I've been deeply rooted in the Harlem Renaissance for many years.

There is no moral precept that does not have something inconvenient about it.

Start in a small TV station so you can make all of your embarrassing mistakes early and in front of fewer people!

American poetry, like American painting, is always personal with an emphasis on the individuality of the poet.

People tend to vote the present tense - not the subjective.

We are coming out of a century that was taught that one way of looking at the world, that one form of behavior, is as valid as another. The idea of true evil has been blown away.