Literature Quotes
I have always believed that all things depended upon Fortune, and nothing upon ourselves.
Books can only reveal us to ourselves, and as often as they do us this service we lay them aside.
A grocer is attracted to his business by a magnetic force as great as the repulsion which renders it odious to artists.
Reality deals in specifics under the guise of generalities. Literature does the contrary.
Literature is the human activity that make the fullest and most precise account of variousness, possibility, complexity, and difficulty.
What matters in literature in the end is surely the idiosyncratic, the individual, the flavor or the color of a particular human suffering.
Since the last decades of the nineteenth century, revolt against the objectified world has determined the character of art and literature.
My family pleaded with me to forget literature and do something sensible, such as find some sort of useful work.
Words, words, words! They shut one off from the universe. Three quarters of the time one's never in contact with things, only with the beastly words that stand for them.
The woman who can't influence her husband to vote the way she wants ought to be ashamed of herself.
Escapist literature gets a bad rap. But I think escape is important for a lot of people in a lot of places.
Britons seem to have given up on assimilating their Muslim population, with many British elites patting themselves on the back for their tolerance and multiculturalism.
There is much good luck in the world, but it is luck. We are none of us safe. We are children, playing or quarrelling on the line.
No matter what Aristotle and the Philosophers say, nothing is equal to tobacco; it's the passion of the well-bred, and he who lives without tobacco lives a life not worth living.
I believe there's no proverb but what is true; they are all so many sentences and maxims drawn from experience, the universal mother of sciences.
'Tis pleasant, sure, to see one's name in print. A book's a book, although there's nothing in 't.
Lastly, literature and philosophy both allow past idols to be resurrected with a frequency which would be truly distressing to a sober scientist.
Education is not a discipline at all. Half vocational, half emptiness dressed up in garments borrowed from philosophy, psychology, literature.
I don't think literature will be purged until its philosophic pretentiousness is extruded, and I shant live to see that purge, nor perhaps when it has happened will anything survive.
The human mind is a dramatic structure in itself and our society is absolutely saturated with drama
Pleasant it to behold great encounters of warfare arrayed over the plains, with no part of yours in peril.
Art is the close scrutiny of reality and therefore I put on the stage only those things that I know happen in our society.
In our day the conventional element in literature is elaborately disguised by a law of copyright pretending that every work of art is an invention distinctive enough to be patented.
Nine times out of ten, in the arts as in life, there is actually no truth to be discovered; there is only error to be exposed.
When the severity of the law is to be softened, let pity, not bribes, be the motive.
Ends and purposes, whether they exist as conscious or subconscious tendencies, form the wrap and woof of our conscious experience.
My own experience is that a certain kind of genius among students is best brought out in bed.