Literature Quotes

Ultimately, literature is nothing but carpentry. With both you are working with reality, a material just as hard as wood.

Music is the literature of the heart; it commences where speech ends.

It's amazing how, age after age, in country after country, and in all languages, Shakespeare emerges as incomparable.

Sunday is the golden clasp that binds together the volume of the week.

Even bad books are books and therefore sacred.

They blossomed, they did not talk about blossoming.

Ask no questions, and you'll be told no lies.

While thoughts exist, words are alive and literature becomes an escape, not from, but into living.

I was much more interested in literature than I was in art. I just got into art by mistake.

For each letter received from a creditor, write fifty lines on an extraterrestrial subject and you will be saved.

The difference between humans and wild animals is that humans pray before they commit murder.

Religions are the cradles of despotism.

The process of writing has something infinite about it. Even though it is interrupted each night, it is one single notation.

And there never was an apple, in Adam's opinion, that wasn't worth the trouble you got into for eating it.

Relativism is neither a method of fighting, nor a method of creating, for both of these are uncompromising and at times even ruthless; rather, it is a method of cognition.

Painting is literature in colors. Literature is painting in language.

Literature illuminates life only for those to whom books are a necessity.

There are some enterprises in which a careful disorderliness is the true method.

A New York divorce is in itself a diploma of virtue.

The difficulty of literature is not to write, but to write what you mean; not to affect your reader, but to affect him precisely as you wish.

The test of literature is, I suppose, whether we ourselves live more intensely for the reading of it.

The world remains ever the same.

The coward only threatens when he is safe.

Literature ceases to be literature when it commits itself to moral uplift; it becomes moral philosophy or some such dull thing.

An audience is always warming but it must never be necessary to your work.

Ultimately, literature is nothing but carpentry.

It is the child in man that is the source of his uniqueness and creativeness, and the playground is the optimal milieu for the unfolding of his capacities and talents.

Every beloved object is the center point of a paradise.

We have always created - music, literature, art, dance. The art around us - or lack of it - may be a measure of how we're doing as individuals and as a civilization, so maybe we should be worried.

We are more closely connected to the invisible than to the visible.

I will buy any creme, cosmetic, or elixir from a woman with a European accent.

In 1765, Parliament passed the Stamp Act, which, as any American high school student can tell you, was an act that apparently had something to do with stamps.

Cognition is not fighting, but once someone knows a lot, he will have much to fight for, so much that he will be called a relativist because of it.

Every man's work, whether it be literature, or music or pictures or architecture or anything else, is always a portrait of himself.

Real literature is something much better than a harmless instrument for getting through idle hours. The purpose of great literature is to help us to develop into full human beings.

Martyrs do not underrate the body, they allow it to be elevated on the cross. In this they are at one with their antagonists.

When in Rome, do as you done in Milledgeville.

Vulgarity is the garlic in the salad of charm.

Too low they build who build below the skies.

Trouble has no necessary connection with discouragement. Discouragement has a germ of its own, as different from trouble as arthritis is different from a stiff joint.

Cruelty is contagious in uncivilized communities.

If I had thought about it, I wouldn't have done the experiment. The literature was full of examples that said you can't do this.

If a woman hasn't got a tiny streak of harlot in her, she's a dry stick as a rule.

Jane Austen is the pinnacle to which all other authors aspire.

Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered weak and weary.

Don't appear so scholarly, pray. Humanize your talk, and speak to be understood.

Literature, whether handed down by word or mouth or in print, gives us a second handle on reality.

We are infected by our own misunderstandin g of how our own minds work.

In poetry, even discourse about doubts must be cast in a discourse that cannot be doubted.

When I read great literature, great drama, speeches, or sermons, I feel that the human mind has not achieved anything greater than the ability to share feelings and thoughts through language.