Literature Quotes

Our lives are greatly enriched when we immerse ourselves in literature and spiritual writing, not because we are going to be tested but purely for the sake of enrichment.

The press is the exclusive literature of the million; to them it is literature, church, and college.

We turn to literature to remedy the loss, to impose some kind of meaningful order on the nonsequential.

James Joyce is a cul-de-sac. [Ulysses is] ... an example how literature branched out and went into, lost itself in nowhere, no man's land.

I think it is a quest of literature throughout the ages to describe the human condition.

I'm not so sure that horror should be dismissed as something less than literature.

Literature can be divided into two large families: the religious and the secular one. The first reveals the origin of stupidity, the second follows its evolution.

Religion is only literature, but luckily literature is not only religion.

Poe gives the sense for the first time in America, that literature is serious, not a matter of courtesy but of truth.

I'm afraid I take ... this rather clinical view of love: it's saving you from madness. I'm not so enthusiastic as other poets have been.

Literature, taken in all its bearings, forms the grand line of demarcation between the human and the animal kingdoms.

Literature, like nobility, runs in the blood.

It is astonishing how many mental operations we can explain when we have once grasped the principles of association

I have the same confidence in the ability of our people to reject noxious literature as I have in their capacity to sort out the true from the false in theology, economics, or any other field.

Willmott, the English essayist, says poetry is the natural religion of literature.

Literature is a comprehensive essence of the intellectual life of a nation.

Nonfiction writers are second-class citizens, the Ellis Island of literature. We just can't quite get in. And yes, it pisses me off.

Literature has to serve as a moral control of politics.

It is not possible to build on negative emotions. Genuine literature will come only when we replace hatred for man with love for man.

Truth is the first thing that present-day literature lacks. The writer has drowned himself in lies, he is too accustomed to speak prudently, with a careful look over his shoulder.

What we need in literature today are vast philosophic horizons... we need the most ultimate, the most fearsome, the most fearless "Why?" and "What next?".

Dogma, static positions, consonance - all these are obstacles to catching the disease of art, at least in its more complex forms.

I'm very attracted to exile literature - particularly Nabokov - exactly because the idea of being away from home for any serious length of time is so inconceivable to me.

The pagan gods are not dead, but can return to topple science with superstition and modern man with besti*l pleasures that pre-date civilisation.

No man is offended by another man's admiration of the woman he loves it is the woman only who can make it a torment.

You are a wonderful creation. You know more than you think you know, just as you know less than you want to know.

You must go on.I can’t go on.I’ll go on.

But I hate to hear you talking so like a fine gentleman, and as if women were all fine ladies, instead of rational creatures. We none of us expect to be in smooth water all our days.

For thy sweet love remembr'd such wealth bringsThat then, I scorn to change my state with kings.

Music expresses that which cannot be put into words and that which cannot remain silent

we must bringour own lightto thedarkness.

I think that I had better go, Holmes.""Not a bit, doctor. Stay where you are. I am lost without my Boswell.

In literature the ambition of the novice is to acquire the literary language the struggle of the adept is to get rid of it.

While an author is yet living we estimate his powers by his worst performance, and when he is dead we rate them by his best.

There is nothing which can better deserve our patronage than the promotion of science and literature. Knowledge is in every country the surest basis of public happiness.

I go to books and to nature as the bee goes to a flower, for a nectar that I can make into my own honey.

The words that strike us are those that awake an echo in a zone we have already made our own—the place where we live—and the vibration enables us to find fresh starting points within ourselves.

Books are the perfect entertainment: no commercials, no batteries, hours of enjoyment for each dollar spent.

Your goodness must have some edge to it -- else it is none.

The clean book bill will be one of the most immoral measures ever adopted. It will throw American art back into the junk heap.

I have not yet tranquillised myself enough to see Frederica.

If Art does not enlarge men’s sympathies, it does nothing morally.

Reading is thinking with someone else's head instead of ones own.

Esteem him! Like him! Cold-hearted Elinor! Oh! worse than cold-hearted! Ashamed of being otherwise. Use those words again, and I will leave the room this moment.

I do not know where the error lies. I do not pretend to set people right, but I do see they are often wrong.

We do not claim that the portrait we are making is the whole truth, only that it is a resemblance.

It was hard to love a woman that always made you feel so wishful.

A myth is something that has never happened, but is happening all the time.

The trade of critic, in literature, music, and the drama, is the most degraded of all trades.

To have all those noble Romans alive before me, and walking in and out for my entertainment, instead of being the stern taskmasters they had been at school, was a most novel and delightful effect.