Literature Quotes

Sigmund Freud was a half baked Viennese quack. Our literature, culture, and the the films of Woody Allen would be better today if Freud had never written a word.
Ian Shoales
The tendinous part of the mind, so to speak, is more developed in winter the fleshy, in summer. I should say winter had given the bone and sinew to literature, summer the tissues and the blood.
John Burroughs
To encourage literature and the arts is a duty which every good citizen owes to his country.
George Washington
Literature is a luxury; fiction is a necessity.
G. K. Chesterton, Defendant (1901)
Literature is the art of writing something that will be read twice journalism what will be read once.
Cyril Connolly
Edgar allan poe, from a letter to frederick w. thomas (february 14, 1849). - depend upon it, after all, thomas, literature is...
We pass the word around; we ponder how the case is put by different people, we read the poetry; we meditate over the literature; we play the music; we change our minds; we reach an understanding. Society evolves this way, not by shouting each other down, but by the unique capacity of unique, individual human beings to comprehend each other.
Lewis Thomas, The Medusa and the Snail (1979)
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.
James Earl Jones
S. i. hayakawa - in a real sense, people who have read good...
Even in literature and art, no man who bothers about originality will ever be original whereas if you simply try to tell the truth without caring twopence how often it has been told before you will, nine times out of ten, become original without ever having noticed it.
Clive Staples Lewis
The test of literature is, I suppose, whether we ourselves live more intensely for the reading of it.
Elizabeth Drew
Literature is my Utopia. Here I am not disenfranchised. No barrier of the senses shuts me out from the sweet, gracious discourses of my book friends. They talk to me without embarrassment or awkwardness.
Helen Kelle
Literature... is the rediscovery of childhood.
Georges Bataille
Literature is my Utopia. Here I am not disenfranchised. No barrier of the sense shuts me out from the sweet, gracious discourse of my book friends. They talk to me without embarrassment or awkwardness.
Hellen Kelle
In literature as in love, we are astonished at what is chosen by others.
Andre Maurois
We pass the word around we ponder how the case is put by different people, we read the poetry we meditate over the literature we play the music we change our minds we reach an understanding. Society evolves this way, not by shouting each other down, but by the unique capacity of unique, individual human beings to comprehend each other.
Lewis Thomas
In general, in poetry and literature, I am among those people who believe that too much is indispensable.
Yevgeny Aleksandrovich Yevtushenko
Literature is a luxury fiction is a necessity.
G. K. Chesterton
The affair between Margot Asquith and Margot Asquith will live as one of the prettiest love stories in all literature.
Dorothy Parke
Literature is the human activity that takes the fullest and most precise account of variousness, possibility, complexity, and difficulty.
Lionel Trilling
Jokes of the proper kind, properly told, can do more to enlighten questions of politics, philosophy, and literature than any number of dull arguments.
Isaac Asimov
Books are the carriers of civilization. Without books, history is silent, literature dumb, science crippled, thought and speculation at a standstill. I think that there is nothing, not even crime, more opposed to poetry, to philosophy, ay, to life itself than this incessant business.
Henry David Thoreau
This duality has been reflected in classical as well as modern literature as reason versus passion, or mind and the unconscious. There are moments in each of our lives when our verbal - Intellect suggests one course, and our heart or intuition, another.
Robert
It is only by introducing the young to great literature, drama and music, and to the excitement of great science that we open to them the possibilities that lie within the human spirit - - Enable them to see visions and dream dreams.
Eric Anderson
The very essence of literature is the war between emotion and intellect, between life and death. When literature becomes too intellectual - - when it begins to ignore the passions, the motions - - It becomes sterile, silly, and actually without substance.
Isaac Bashevis Singe
Books are the carriers of civilization. Without books, history is silent, literature dumb, science crippled, thought and speculation at a standstill.
Barbara Tuchman
Studying literature at Harvard is like learning about women at the Mayo Clinic.
Roy Blount Jr.
Literature is news that stays news.
Ezra Pound, ABC of Reading (1934) chapter 8
We know too much, and are convinced of too little. Our literature is a substitute for religion, and so is our religion.
T. S. Eliot
Proverbs are the literature of reason, or the statements of absolute truth, without qualification. Like the sacred books of each nation, they are the sanctuary of its intuitions.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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.
Robert Louis Stephenson
Develop interest in life as you see it; in people, things, literature, music - The world is so rich, simply throbbing with rich treasures, beautiful souls and interesting people. Forget yourself.
Henry Mille
Develop interest in life as you see it in people, things, literature, music - The world is so rich, simply throbbing with rich treasures, beautiful souls and interesting people. Forget yourself.
Henry Mille
Literature is strewn with the wreckage of men who have minded beyond reason the opinions of others.
Virginia Woolf
Literature is the art of writing something that will be read twice journalism what will be grasped at once.
Cyril Connolly
Literature should not be surpressed merely because it affects the moral code of the censor.
William Orville Douglas
But what is the difference between literature and journalism? ... Journalism is unreadable and literature is not read. That is all.
Oscar Wilde, The Critic as Artist, 1891
Literature is strewn with the wreckage of those who have minded beyond reason the opinion of others.
Virginia Woolf
Life comes before literature, as the material always comes before the work. The hills are full of marble before the world blooms with statues.
Phillips Brooks
What we call education and culture is for the most part nothing but the substitution of reading for experience, of literature for life, of the obsolete fictitious for the contemporary real.
George Bernard Shaw