Literature Quotes

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

We are all Greeks. Our laws, our literature, our religion, our arts, have their root in Greece.

Percy Bysshe Shelley

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

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)

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

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