Classical quotation is the parole of literary men all over the world. — Samuel Johnson
Literature is a state of culture, poetry is a state of grace, before and after culture. — Juan Ramon Jimenez
The classical writers... playwrights, Jacobean, Elizabethan playwrights, all showed areas of all classes and how they live and painted them pretty authentically. — Timothy West
For Mythology is the handmaid of literature; and literature is one of the best allies of virtue and promoters of happiness. — Thomas Bulfinch
A people's literature is the great textbook for real knowledge of them. The writings of the day show the quality of the people as no historical reconstruction can. — Edith Hamilton
Literature could be said to be a sort of disciplined technique for arousing certain emotions. — Iris Murdoch
Reading literature is a way of reaching back to something bigger and older and different. — Wendy Lesser
Oh literature, oh the glorious Art, how it preys upon the marrow in our bones. It scoops the stuffing out of us, and chucks us aside. Alas! — D. H. Lawrence
Literature is the question minus the answer. — Roland Barthes
In Western Civilization, our elders are books. — Gary Snyder
Literature is the supreme means by which you renew your sensuous and emotional life and learn a new awareness. — F. R. Leavis
Great literature should do some good to the reader: must quicken his perception though dull, and sharpen his discrimination though blunt, and mellow the rawness of his personal opinions. — A. E. Housman
Literature is the most agreeable way of ignoring life. — Fernando Pessoa
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
Ancient Literature Quotes
At bottom, textual criticism for virtually all other ancient literature relies on creative conjectures, or imaginative guesses, at reconstructing the wording of the original. Not so with the New Testament. — Daniel B. Wallace
Jesus is a mythical figure in the tradition of pagan mythology and almost nothing in all of ancient literature would lead one to believe otherwise. Anyone wanting to believe Jesus lived and walked as a real live human being must do so despite the evidence, not because of it. — Dennis McKinsey
I am also well aware that literature only has a minimal influence on political disputes or economic crises in the world, but its significance to human beings is ancient. — Mo Yan
Great literature is simply language charged with meaning to the utmost possible degree.
Few of the great works of ancient Greek literature are easy reading. — Gilbert Murray
There is no body of ancient literature in the world which enjoys such a wealth of good textual attestation as the New Testament. — F. F. Bruce
Nothing is more witty and grotesque than ancient mythology and Christianity; that is because they are so mystical. — Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel
A classic is a book that has never been finished saying what it has to say.
As the ancient commander addressed his soldiers before battle, so should the moralist speak to men in the struggle of the era. — Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel
My mother's father taught English literature. When I was about ten or eleven, I could recite Macaulay's 'Lays of Ancient Rome.' While other kids were playing pedestrian war games, I'd be Horatius keeping the bridge. — Bernie Taupin
More immediately, I'm currently working on another Dracula in which there will be connections with ancient Egypt. That's about as far as I want to go in commenting on current work. — Fred Saberhagen
The day is past when schools could afford to give sufficient time and attention to the teaching of the ancient languages to enable the student to get that enjoyment out of classical literature that made the lives of our grandfathers so rich. — James Loeb
Literature History Quotes
I lead no party; I follow no leader. I have given the best part of my life to careful study of Islam, its law and polity, its culture, its history and its literature. — Muhammad Iqbal
Books are the carriers of civilization. Without books, history is silent. — Henry David Thoreau
How do you make any sense of history, art or literature without knowing the stories and iconography of your own culture and all the world's main religions? — Polly Toynbee
To me history ought to be a source of pleasure. It isn't just part of our civic responsibility. To me it's an enlargement of the experience of being alive, just the way literature or art or music is. — David McCullough
Books are the carriers of civilization. Without books, history is silent, literature dumb, science crippled, thought and speculation at a standstill. — Barbara Tuchman
One of the best known, and one of the least intelligible, facts of literary history is the lateness, in Western European Literature at any rate, of prose fiction, and the comparative absence, in the two great classical languages, of what we call by that name. — George Saintsbury
In the theatre we reach out and touch the past through literature, history and memory so that we might receive and relive significant and relevant human qualities in the present and then pass them on to future generations. — Anne Bogart
Don’t learn literature from a history teacher. — Vijay Kedia
Literature overtakes history, for literature gives you more than one life. It expands experience and opens new opportunities to readers. — Carlos Fuentes
True education does not consist merely in the acquiring of a few facts of science, history, literature, or art, but in the development of character. — David O. Mckay
Classical Art Quotes
A painter paints pictures on canvas. But musicians paint their pictures on silence. — Leopold Stokowski
A Classical style... is the syllogism of art, the only legitimate process from one world to another. Classicism is not the manner of any fixed age or of any fixed country; it is a constant state of the artistic mind. It is a temper of security and satisfaction and patience. — James Joyce
What is important is that our optical awareness rids itself of classical notions of beauty and opens itself more and more to the beauty of the instant and of these surprising points of view that appear for a brief moment and never return; those are what make photography an art. — Raoul Hausmann
But really, it was reading that led me to writing. And in particular, reading the American classics like Twain who taught me at an early age that ordinary lives of ordinary people can be made into high art. — Russell Banks
Much as I cared for Joseph Kennedy, he was a classic example of that person in the arts with lots of brains and drive but little taste or talent. — Gloria Swanson
I went to the Performing Arts School and studied classical ballet. That attitude is something that's put into your head. You are never thin enough. — Carmen Electra
Do not deny the classical approach, simply as a reaction, or you will have created another pattern and trapped yourself there. — Bruce Lee
Wagner’s music is better than it sounds. — Mark Twain
If classical music is the state of the art, then the arts are in a sad state. — Frank Zappa
I've worked with some great orchestras and amazing classical musicians, but I don't like the conceptualization of classical music as an elitist form of art. — Serj Tankian
Classical Education Quotes
What horrifies me most is the idea of being useless: well-educated, brilliantly promising, and fading out into an indifferent middle age. — Sylvia Plath
I doubt whether classical education ever has been or can be successfully carried out without corporal punishment. — George Orwell
Classical education has deformed everything, and has imposed upon us as geniuses men of correct, facile talent, who follow the beaten track. — Emile Zola
Pyramid-building, earthquakes, even wars may serve to increase wealth, if the education of our statesmen on the principles of the classical economics stands in the way of anything better. — John Maynard Keynes
Fate of empires depends on the education of youth — Aristotle
It is a capital mistake to theorize before you have all the evidence. It biases the judgment. — Arthur Conan Doyle
I owe the little formal education I got to my drama teacher, Mr. Pickett, who got us to read Shakespeare, Moliere, and other classics. — Dennis Quaid
Anyone who has passed though the regular gradations of a classical education, and is not made a fool by it, may consider himself as having had a very narrow escape. — William Hazlitt
Teaching is the last refuge of feeble minds with a classical education. — Aldous Huxley
If income was directly proportional to technical proficiency and education, classical and jazz musicians would be some of the most affluent people in the world. — Robert Emerson Coleman
Great Literature Quotes
We shouldn't teach great books; we should teach a love of reading. Knowing the contents of a few works of literature is a trivial achievement. Being inclined to go on reading is a great achievement. — B. F. Skinner
All great literature is one of two stories; a man goes on a journey or a stranger comes to town. — Leo Tolstoy
Herman Melville was as separated from a civilized literature as the lost Atlantis was said to have been from the great peoples of the earth. — Edward Dahlberg
So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past. — F. Scott Fitzgerald
As I passed along the side walls of Westminster Abbey, I hardly saw any thing but marble monuments of great admirals, but which were all too much loaded with finery and ornaments, to make on me at least, the intended impression. — Karl Philipp Moritz
Every great political campaign rewrites the rules; devising a new way to win is what gives campaigns a comparative advantage against their foes. — John Podhoretz
First of all, the Jewish religion has a great deal in common with the Christian religion because, as Rabbi Gillman points out in the show, Christianity is based on Judaism. Christ was Jewish. — Barbara Walters
Pop changes week to week, month to month. But great music is like literature. — Ravi Shankar
Although spoken English doesn't obey the rules of written language, a person who doesn't know the rules thoroughly is at a great disadvantage. — Marilyn vos Savant
I doubt if anything learnt at school is of more value than great literature learnt by heart. — Richard Livingstone
English Literature Quotes
It has since been agreed that speeches given in English will be translated into French and vice versa, and even into German and Italian when necessary. No doubt translations into Esperanto will also soon be in demand. — Fredrik Bajer
I studied English literature in the honors program, which means that you had to take courses in various centuries. You had to start with Old English, Middle English, and work your way toward the modern. I figured if I did that it would force me to read some of the things I might not read on my own. — Jeffrey Eugenides
I have preferred to teach my students not English literature but my love for certain authors, or, even better, certain pages, or even better than that, certain lines. One falls in love with a line, then with a page, then with an author. Well, why not? It is a beautiful process. — Jorge Luis Borges
But this is exactly why I read--and don't belong to a book group--because reading is the most individual thing there is. Why collectivize it? Didn't we have enough bad English teachers in school? Crowd sourcing and literature shouldn't mix. — Peter Orner
The Irishman in English literature may be said to have been born with an apology in his mouth. — James Connolly
My old English buddy, John Rackham, wrote and told me what made science fiction different from all other kinds of literature - science fiction is written according to the science fiction method. — Frederik Pohl
I'm into books – I love literature, so I toyed with the idea of being an English teacher. I had a fantastic English teacher at school. I think great English teachers make the world go round. — Taron Egerton
I soon realized that a student of English literature who does not know the Bible does not understand a good deal of what is going on in what he reads: The most conscientous student will be continually misconstruing the implications, even the meaning. — Northrop Frye
Middlemarch, the magnificent book which with all its imperfections is one of the few English novels for grown-up people. — Virginia Woolf
I had passed through the entire British education system studying literature, culminating in three years of reading English at Oxford, and they'd never told me about something as basic as the importance of point of view in fiction! — Philip Pullman
World Literature Quotes
When we no longer have good cooking in the world, we will have no literature, nor high and sharp intelligence, nor friendly gatherings, no social harmony. — Marie-Antoine Careme
An aphorism ought to be entirely isolated from the surrounding world like a little work of art and complete in itself like a hedgehog. — Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel
But I don't want comfort. I want God, I want poetry, I want real danger, I want freedom, I want goodness. I want sin. — Aldous Huxley
It is my earnest hope, and indeed the hope of all mankind, that from this solemn occasion a better world shall emerge out of the blood and carnage of the past... — Douglas MacArthur
Literature provides us with the opportunity to escape into fictional worlds that are ultimately rooted in human universals shaped by common biological forces. — Gad Saad
Watch with glittering eyes the whole world around you. — Roald Dahl
I can say without affectation that I belong to the Russian convict world no less than I do to Russian literature. I got my education there, and it will last forever. — Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
I am one of the writers who wish to create serious works of literature which dissociate themselves from those novels which are mere reflections of the vast consumer cultures of Tokyo and the subcultures of the world at large. — Kenzaburo Oe
The power of literature to foster empathy is one of the most important ways in which it contributes to our understanding of the world. — Martha C. Nussbaum
In the morning I bathe my intellect in the stupendous and cosmogonal philosophy of the Bhagavad-Gita, in comparison with which our modern world and its literature seems puny and trivial. — Henry David Thoreau
If you make the choice of reading classic literature every day for a year, rather than reading the news, by the end of that time period you’ll have a more honed sensitivity for recognizing greatness from the books than from the media. — Rick Rubin
I had a lot of classical influences. I had classical music and opera and literature, but I also liked sleaze. And putting it together, sleaze and glamour, it just made sense to me. — Rick Owens
In Tar Baby, the classic concept of the individual with a solid, coherent identity is eschewed for a model of identity which sees the individual as a kaleidoscope of heterogeneous impulses and desires, constructed from multiple forms of interaction with the world as a play of difference that cannot be completely comprehended. — Toni Morrison
Writing detective stories is about writing light literature, for entertainment. It isn't primarily a question of writing propaganda or classical literature. — Steig Larsson
I love the Russian classics very much, the Russian classical literature. But I also read modern literature. As far as Russian literature is concerned, I am very fond of Tolstoy and Chekhov, and I also enjoy reading Gogol very much. — Vladimir Putin
Chess is my profession. I am my own boss; I am free. I like literature and music, classical especially. I am in fact quite normal; I have a Bohemian profession without being myself a Bohemian. I am neither a conformist nor a great revolutionary. — Bent Larsen
Classic literature is still something that hangs in the air like a song. — Gilbert K. Chesterton
The classics are only primitive literature. They belong to the same class as primitive machinery and primitive music and primitive medicine. — Stephen Leacock
Most of what we call the classics of world literature suggest artifacts in a wax museum. We have to hire and pay professors to get them read and talked about. — Edward Abbey
Allen Ginsberg was a world authority on the writing of William Blake, and had an incredible knowledge of classic literature and world politics. — David Amram
I really, really wanted to write. I loved language. I loved literature. I loved reading. I never read a foreign language, I'm afraid, but I loved Flaubert. I loved the 19th-century classics. I love Thomas Hardy. I wanted to be a goof on a bus, but I wanted to write more. — Robert Stone
One classic American landscape haunts all of American literature. It is a picture of Eden, perceived at the instant of history when corruption has just begun to set it. The serpent has shown his scaly head in the undergrowth. The apple gleams on the tree. The old drama of the Fall is ready to start all over again. — Jonathan Raban
The classics of the ancient world are everywhere in the literature of the Revolution, but thet are everywhere illustrative, not determinative, of thought — Bernard Bailyn
This duality has been reflected in classical as well as modern literature as reason versus passion, or mind versus intuition. The split between the conscious mind and the unconscious. There are moments in each of our lives when our verbal-intellect suggests one course, and our hearts, or intuition, another. — Robert E. Ornstein
They [Narnia] are, perhaps, the greatest classics of children’s literature of the twentieth century. — Douglas Gresham
Some days are like that. Even in Australia. — Judith Viorst
The great British Library -- one of these sequestered pools of obsolete literature to which modern authors repair, and draw buckets full of classic lore, or pure English, undefiled wherewith to swell their own scanty rills of thought. — Washington Irving
In science, read by preference the newest works. In literature, read the oldest. The classics are always modern. — Lord Edward Lytton
There's a wealth of literature out there which, hopefully, will be, you know, exploded in the future, and I personally find it very rewarding to be involved with classic storytelling, and sort of legendary characters. — Sean Bean
In science, read, by preference, the newest works; in literature, the oldest. The classic literature is always modern. — Edward G. Bulwer-Lytton
That's the old AA maxim, "Always have a drink in your hand and you'll never want a drink." That's one of the most classic deceptions in the literature: "I'll take a drink tomorrow." I actually don't think that's necessarily a very helpful maxim in AA, but it's a very good maxim in showing how strategic self-deception can be employed, even self-consciously. That's the amazing thing, to me, about self-deception. — Clancy Martin
My daughter is reading various Young Adult vampire stuff, and I ask her, "Is there even a bad vampire in the story?" There's always a good vampire now, but do any of them sleep in coffins? And I would bring her down to my library and say, "Here's every classic vampire literature. There are coffins, there's this, there's that," you know? "When you get to the YA stuff, you may try some of this stuff just to see where it came from." — Mike Mignola
The form [of literature] matters little to me, classical or not. — Jean-Paul Sartre
The road has been viewed as a male turf. If you think of the classic "Odyssey," of, you know, classical literature or Jack Kerouac or almost any road story, it's really about a man on the road. There's an assumption that the road is too dangerous for women. — Gloria Steinem
I'm a big believer in pairing classics with contemporary literature, so students have the opportunity to see that literature is not a cold, dead thing that happened once but instead a vibrant mode of storytelling that's been with us a long time - and will be with us, I hope, for a long time to come. — John Green
In literature, you either create a classical or create a foam! There is no in between! — Mehmet Murat Ildan
The classic theology of my tradition comes from the French Renaissance. [William] Shakespeare was born in 1564, the year [John] Calvin died, and that theology was very influential in England in his lifetime. I think Shakespeare was attentive to questions raised by it, about human nature, history, reality itself. I find the two literatures to be mutually illuminating. — Marilynne Robinson
I think all writers of my age who are brought up on films probably by the age of 16 have seen many more films than they have read classics of literature. We can't help but be influenced by film. Film has got some great tricks that it's taught writers. — David Mitchell
Some of what we read in classical literature is not relative to our condition, but then many women novelists and poets have turned it upside down and told the stories from the other point of view. — Margaret Drabble
As for the author, he is profoundly unaware of what the classical or romantic genre might consist of.... In literature, as in allthings, there is only the good and the bad, the beautiful and the ugly, the true and the false. — Victor Hugo
A child without an acquaintance of some kind with a classic of literature ... suffers from that impoverishment for the rest of his life. No later intimacy is like that of the first. — Lizette Woodworth Reese
It is a fact that the classics of Yiddish literature are also the classics of the modern Hebrew literature. — Isaac Bashevis Singer
To view an object in the proper light we must stand away from it. The study of the classical literatures gives the aloofness which cultivates insight. In learning to live with peoples and civilizations that have long ceased to be alive, we gain a vantage point, acquire an enlargement and elevation of thought, which enable us to study with a more impartial and liberal mind the condition of the society around us. — John Lancaster Spalding
The Jews are among the aristocracy of every land; if a literature is called rich in the possession of a few classic tragedies, what shall we say to a national tragedy lasting for fifteen hundred years, in which the poets and the actors were also the heroes. — George Eliot
I was really exposed to great old-time literature - the classics, the poetic realists like Strindberg and Ibsen and all those guys. I was really inspired by all those guys. That's when writing became a primary focus. — Kurt Sutter
Literature begins with the possible model of experience, and what it produces is the literary model we call the classic. — Northrop Frye
Parents...rigidly monitor the selection of television programs...and other forms of entertainment for your family. Foster in your homes a love of knowledge through uplifting literature; wholesome books; selective movies; classical and exemplary popular music; entertainment that uplifts and edifies the spirit and mind. — David B. Haight
There is nothing like Integral Dreaming in the literature. This is an ambitious undertaking and its readers will gain an in-depth understanding of dreams and dreaming that they will find nowhere else. The ‘five movements’ of Integral Dream Practice will encourage many readers to follow the steps outlined, and integrate dreamwork into their own lives. This book will be an instant classic in the field. — Stanley Krippner
The great British Library --an immense collection of volumes of all ages and languages, many of which are now forgotten, and most of which are seldom read: one of these sequestered pools of obsolete literature to which modern authors repair, and draw buckets full of classic lore, or pure English, undefiled wherewith to swell their own scanty rills of thought. — Washington Irving
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