Literature Quotes
Literature is the art of writing something that will be read twice; journalism what will be read once.Cyril Connolly, Enemies of Promise (1938)
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
Literature is a luxury; fiction is a necessity.G. K. Chesterton, Defendant (1901)
The test of literature is, I suppose, whether we ourselves live more intensely for the reading of it.Elizabeth Drew
Literature... is the rediscovery of childhood.Georges Bataille
Depend upon it, after all, Thomas, Literature is the most noble of professions. In fact, it is about the only one fit for a man. For my own part, there is no seducing me from the path.Edgar Allan Poe, From a letter to Frederick W. Thomas (February 14, 1849).
Literature is strewn with the wreckage of men who have minded beyond reason the opinions of others.Virginia Woolf
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
Our American professors like their literature clear, cold, pure and very dead.Sinclair Lewis
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
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
The affair between Margot Asquith and Margot Asquith will live as one of the prettiest love stories in all literature.Dorothy Parke
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
In literature as in love, we are astonished at what is chosen by others.Andre Maurois
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
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
Books are the carriers of civilization. Without books, history is silent, literature dumb, science crippled, thought and speculation at a standstill.Barbara Tuchman
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
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
In a real sense, people who have read good literature have lived more than people who cannot or will not read. It is not true that we have only one life to live; if we can read, we can live as many more lives and as many kinds of lives as we wish.S. I. Hayakawa
Literature is the orchestration of platitudes.Thornton
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
The one way of tolerating existence is to lose oneself in literature as in a perpetual orgy.Gustave Flaubert
To encourage literature and the arts is a duty which every good citizen owes to his country.George Washington
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
There are three things men can do with women love them, suffer for them, or turn them into literature.Stephen Stills
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
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
In general, in poetry and literature, I am among those people who believe that too much is indispensable.Yevgeny Aleksandrovich Yevtushenko
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
Literature is the art of writing something that will be read twice journalism what will be read once.Cyril Connolly
Literature should not be surpressed merely because it affects the moral code of the censor.William Orville Douglas
We are all Greeks. Our laws, our literature, our religion, our arts, have their root in Greece.Percy Bysshe Shelley
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
My main reason for adopting literature as a profession was that, as the author is never seen by his clients, he need not dress respectably.George Bernard Shaw
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
Literature is a luxury fiction is a necessity.G. K. Chesterton
But what is the difference between literature and journalism... Journalism is unreadable and literature is not read. That is all.Oscar Wilde
