Literature Quotes
In literature as in love, we are astonished at what is chosen by others.Andre Maurois
The one way of tolerating existence is to lose oneself in literature as in a perpetual orgy.Gustave Flaubert
But what is the difference between literature and journalism... Journalism is unreadable and literature is not read. That is all.Oscar Wilde
Literature is news that stays news.Ezra Pound, ABC of Reading (1934) chapter 8
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
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
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
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
Literature is strewn with the wreckage of men who have minded beyond reason the opinions of others.Virginia Woolf
Literature should not be surpressed merely because it affects the moral code of the censor.William Orville Douglas
The test of literature is, I suppose, whether we ourselves live more intensely for the reading of it.Elizabeth Drew
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
Studying literature at Harvard is like learning about women at the Mayo Clinic.Roy Blount Jr.
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
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
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
To encourage literature and the arts is a duty which every good citizen owes to his country.George Washington
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
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, The Medusa and the Snail (1979)
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 orchestration of platitudes.Thornton
Literature is the art of writing something that will be read twice journalism what will be grasped at once.Cyril Connolly
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
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
We are all Greeks. Our laws, our literature, our religion, our arts, have their root in Greece.Percy Bysshe Shelley
Literature is strewn with the wreckage of those who have minded beyond reason the opinion of others.Virginia Woolf
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, Defendant (1901)
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
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 the art of writing something that will be read twice journalism what will be read once.Cyril Connolly
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
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
Our American professors like their literature clear, cold, pure and very dead.Sinclair Lewis
Literature is the art of writing something that will be read twice; journalism what will be read once.Cyril Connolly, Enemies of Promise (1938)
Literature is the human activity that takes the fullest and most precise account of variousness, possibility, complexity, and difficulty.Lionel Trilling
