Literature has the power to change lives, minds, and hearts. — Cam'ron
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
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
Great literature is simply language charged with meaning to the utmost possible degree. — Ezra Pound
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 is the supreme means by which you renew your sensuous and emotional life and learn a new awareness. — F. R. Leavis
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 a state of culture, poetry is a state of grace, before and after culture. — Juan Ramon Jimenez
Literature is the question minus the answer. — Roland Barthes
The excellence of this important contribution to genre literature CANNOT be overstated A masterwork. — William F. Nolan
A good book is the precious lifeblood of a master spirit. — John Milton
Literature could be said to be a sort of disciplined technique for arousing certain emotions. — Iris Murdoch
True literature can exist only where it is created, not by diligent and trustworthy functionaries, but by madmen, hermits, heretics, dreamers, rebels, and skeptics. — Yevgeny Zamyatin
Literature is humanity's broad-minded alter-ego, with room in its heart for monsters, even for you. It's humanity without the judgement. — Glen Duncan
Short Great Literature Quotes
Literature is the most agreeable way of ignoring life. — Fernando Pessoa
All great literature is one of two stories; a man goes on a journey or a stranger comes to town. — Leo Tolstoy
Literature is air, and Im suffocating in mediocrity. — Armand Assante
Reading literature is a way of reaching back to something bigger and older and different. — Wendy Lesser
Silence is a source of great strength.
Great Novels Quotes
Comic books and graphic novels are a great medium. It's incredibly underused. — Darren Aronofsky
Oh, how few find time for prayer! There is time for everything else, time to sleep and time to eat, time to read the newspaper and the novel, time to visit friends, time for everything else under the sun, but-no time for prayer, the most important of all things, the one great essential! — Oswald J. Smith
This is not a novel to be tossed aside lightly. It should be thrown with great force. — Dorothy Parker
Make today so awesome, yesterday gets jealous.
The great American novel has not only already been written, it has already been rejected. — Frank Dane
I don't think anyone has written a great graphic novel. — Ted Rall
The great advantage of a novel is you can put in whatever comes into your head - it has the same shape as the human brain. — Michel Houellebecq
Great minds discuss ideas.Average minds discuss events.Small minds discuss people.
I'm just trying to tell a good story and make thought-provoking, entertaining films. I just try and draw upon the great culture we have as a people, from music, novels, the streets. — Spike Lee
All great novels, all true novels, are bisexual. — Milan Kundera
I'm a great believer in gathering together all your obsessions and seeing if you can make a novel out of them. — Scarlett Thomas
Good Literature Quotes
The beauty of literature is you allow readers to see things through other peoples eyes. All good books do this. — Sandra Cisneros
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
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
Not all of us can do great things. But we can do small things with great love.
An ass may bray a good while before he shakes the stars down. — George Eliot
The Crucifixion and other historical precedents notwithstanding, many of us still believe that outstanding goodness is a kind of armor, that virtue, seen plain and bare, gives pause to criminality. But perhaps it is the other way around. — Mary McCarthy
Good children's literature appeals not only to the child in the adult, but to the adult in the child. — Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Acknowledge all of your small victories. They will eventually add up to something great.
It did occur to me that the effect of good literature may be as dizzying as that of alcohol. — Pamela Dean
In a very real sense, people who have read good literature have lived more than people who cannot or will not read. — S. I. Hayakawa
The best of men cannot suspend their fate; The good die early, and the bad die late. — Daniel Defoe
A good idea will keep you awake during the morning, but a great idea will keep you awake during the night. — Marilyn vos Savant
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
You need a little bit of insanity to do great things.
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
Failure is a great teacher, and, if you are open to it, every mistake has a lesson to offer.
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
World Literature Quotes
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
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
To a great mind, nothing is little.
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
So in my freshman year at the University of Alabama, learning the literature on evolution, what was known about it biologically, just gradually transformed me by taking me out of literalism and increasingly into a more secular, scientific view of the world. — E. O. Wilson
I found that dance, music, and literature is how I made sense of the world... it pushed me to think of things bigger than lifes daily routines... to think beyond what is immediate or convenient. — Mikhail Baryshnikov
Love 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
Those who don't believe in magic will never find it. — Roald Dahl
When it comes time to sit down and write the next book, you're deathly afraid that you're not up to the task. That was certainly the case with me after Snow Falling on Cedars. — David Guterson
Love your neighbor as yourself but don't take down your fence. — Carl Sandburg
People love as self-recognition what they hate as an accusation. — Elias Canetti
No one who loves life can ignore literature, and no one who loves literature can ignore life. — Laura Esquivel
Average people have great ideas. Legends have great execution.
Whilst in Prussia poets only speak of the love of country as one of the dearest of all human affections, here there is no man who does not feel, and describe with rapture, how much he loves his country. — Karl Philipp Moritz
There's no love more intense than the love we have for our kids - and where there is intense love, there is also intense fear lurking beneath the surface. — Arianna Huffington
You must allow me to tell you how ardently I admire and love you. -Mr. Darcy — Jane Austen
It is not opinions that man needs: it is TRUTH. It is not theology; it is God. It is not religion: it is Christ. It is not literature and science; but the knowledge of the free love of God in the gift of His only-begotten Son. — Horatius Bonar
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
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
Don't fear the failure... in great attempts it is glorious even to fail.
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
No one has ever made himself great by showing how small someone else is.
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
Great Poetry Quotes
You have to really dive deep back into yourself and get rid of so much modern analytical categorization. It's one of the great things poetry does. — Robert Morgan
Any great warrior is also a scholar, and a poet, and an artist. — Steven Seagal
How do I love thee? Let me count the ways.I love thee to the depth and breadth and height My soul can reach, when feeling out of sight For the ends of Being and ideal Grace. — Elizabeth Barrett Browning
A poem is never finished, only abandoned. — Paul Valery
The woods are lovely, dark, and deep but I have promises to keep... — Robert Frost
Time is the coin of life. Only you can determine how it will be spent. — Carl Sandburg
The dance is the mother of the arts. Music and poetry exist in time; painting and architecture in space. But the dance lives at once in time and space. — Curt Sachs
It is a great feeling to know that from a window I can go to books to cans of beer to past loves. And from these gather enough dream to sneak out a back door. — Gregory Corso
Great poetry is always written by somebody straining to go beyond what he can do. — Stephen Spender
French Literature Quotes
What has influenced my life more than any other single thing has been my stammer. Had I not stammered I would probably... have gone to Cambridge as my brothers did, perhaps have become a don and every now and then published a dreary book about French literature. — W. Somerset Maugham
My favorite way to wake up is to have a certain French movie star whisper to me softly at two-thirty in the afternoon that if I want to get to Sweden in time to pick up my Nobel Prize for Literature, I had better ring for breakfast. This occurs rather less often than one might wish. — Fran Lebowitz
I read world literature and I read French romances in the originals. I had quite a profound knowledge - no, that sounds conceited, but I did have a profound interest in everything spiritual. — Baldur von Schirach
In a country like France, so ancient, their history is full of outstanding people, so they carry a heavy weight on their back. Who could write in French after Proust or Flaubert? — Manuel Puig
How far the existence of the Academy has influenced French literature, either for good or for evil, is an extremely dubious question. — Lytton Strachey
The amateur is very rare in French literature - as rare as he is common in our own. — Lytton Strachey
In fact I enjoyed every minute of my life at King's, especially the discovery of French and German literature. — Patrick White
Twitter reminds me of an era in French literature - Emile Zola and Honoré de Balzac - and the beginning of modernity and gossip. They had these fashion magazines of the time on display with all of the Emile Zola references. — Kim Gordon
Many Europeans think that all Moroccans speak French, but no. I had to make an effort to learn it when I studied French literature at the university in Rabat. — Abdellah Taia
There is an interview given by [ Jean-Paul] Sartre in the USA where he is asked what the future of French literature is, and he replies that the next great writer of the future is [Albert] Camus. — Catherine Camus
Classical Literature Quotes
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
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
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
Great Writers Quotes
I have suffered a great deal from writers who have quoted this or that sentence of mine either out of its context or in juxtaposition to some incongruous matter which quite distorted my meaning, or destroyed it altogether. — Alfred North Whitehead
The great writers of aphorisms read as if they had all known each other well. — Elias Canetti
I can’t write five words but that I change seven. — Dorothy Parker
The number one thing I am earnestly attracted to is intelligence. Writers are thus the pinnacle of intelligence. While actors are great and awesome, writers literally create new worlds from scratch. What is sexier than that? Personally, I don't know why every person out there isn't dating a writer. — Rachel Bloom
Peter Lucas and I live in Durham but spend a great of time in North Wales, where we have a cottage in the mountains, and in Vermont, USA, with my sister - who is a children's writer married to a poet. — Anne Stevenson
The great advantage of being a writer is that you can spy on people. You're there, listening to every word, but part of you is observing. Everything is useful to a writer, you see - every scrap, even the longest and most boring of luncheon parties. — Graham Greene
I am hoping that I can be known as a great writer and actor some day, rather than a sex symbol. — Steven Seagal
Don't try to figure out what other people want to hear from you; figure out what you have to say. — Barbara Kingsolver
Like Richard Price and the late, great Elmore Leonard, Matt Burgess is one of those cool, quick and funny writers who can turn a seemingly routine crime caper into something special. — Carl Hiaasen
So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past. — F. Scott Fitzgerald
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
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
I doubt if anything learnt at school is of more value than great literature learnt by heart. — Richard Livingstone
One of the great events in my life was my first meeting with Edison. This wonderful man, who had received no scientific training, yet had accomplished so much, filled me with amazement. I felt that the time I had spent studying languages, literature and art was wasted; though later, of course, I learned this was not so. — Nikola Tesla
And so with the sunshine and the great bursts of leaves growing on the trees, just as things grow in fast movies, I had that familiar conviction that life was beginning over again with the summer. — F. Scott Fitzgerald
One thing that literature would be greatly the better for
Would be a more restricted employment by authors of simile and>metaphor. — Ogden Nash
Tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther. — F. Scott Fitzgerald
I do believe any hero is a person that can be knocked down. A failure isn't a person who gets knocked down; a failure is a person who stays down, and to me, the great heroes take the beating, get knocked down and stand back up again. Perseus is defined as one of the great heroes in literature, so you gotta take that on board. — Sam Worthington
I loved her against reason, against promise, against peace, against hope, against happiness, against all discouragement that could be. — Charles Dickens
Great God of the Ants, thou hast granted victory to thy servants. I appoint thee honorary Colonel. — Karel Capek
Real literature is something much better than a harmless instrument for getting through idle hours. The purpose of great literature is to help us to develop into full human beings. — Russell Kirk
Ask no questions, and you'll be told no lies. — Charles Dickens
Great literature transcends its native land, but none that I know of ignores its soil. — J. Frank Dobie
It takes a great deal of history to produce a little literature. — Henry James
The reason that fiction is more interesting than any other form of literature, to those who really like to study people, is that in fiction the author can really tell the truth without humiliating himself. — Jim Rohn
What is wonderful about great literature is that it transforms the man who reads it towards the condition of the man who wrote. — E. M. Forster
Few of the great works of ancient Greek literature are easy reading. — Gilbert Murray
It has been said that no great work in literature or in science was ever wrought by a man who did not love solitude. We may lay it down as an elemental principle of religion, that no large growth in holiness was ever gained by one who did not take time to be often long alone with God. — Austin Phelps
Great fiction can often present moral messages with greater power and clarity than instructional writing - since literature, after all, penetrates not just the intellect, but the imagination. — Charles Colson
A great literature is thus chiefly the product of doubting and inquiring minds in revolt against the immovable certainties of the nation. — H. L. Mencken
The many great gardens of the world, of literature and poetry, of painting and music, of religion and architecture, all make the point as clear as possible: The soul cannot thrive in the absence of a garden. If you don't want paradise, you are not human; and if you are not human, you don't have a soul. — Thomas Moore
In the history of literature there are many great enduring works which were not published in the lifetimes of the authors. If the authors had not achieved self-affirmation while writing, how could they have continued to write? — Gao Xingjian
Women who marry early are often overly enamored of the kind of man who looks great in wedding pictures and passes the maid of honor his telephone number. — Anna Quindlen
From our human experience and history, at least as far as I am informed, I know that everything essential and great has only emerged when human beings had a home and were rooted in a tradition. Today's literature is, for instance, largely destructive. — Martin Heidegger
Love is a temporary madness. It erupts like an earthquake and then subsides. — Louis de Bernieres
I conclude now I have no inner resources, because I am heavy bored. Peoples bore me, literature bores me, especially great literature. — John Berryman
Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that's no matter - to-morrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther ... And one fine morning --- — F. Scott Fitzgerald
But in reading great literature I become a thousand men and yet remain myself. Like the night sky in the Greek poem, I see with a myriad eyes, but it is still I who see. Here, as in worship, in love, in moral action, and in knowing, I transcend myself; and am never more myself than when I do. — C. S. Lewis
I found it interesting that as people become more technically oriented all over the world, at the same time people are becoming increasingly spiritual. The success of the Da Vinci code - even though it was a great yawn - also showed people's interest in religion. — Barbara Walters
In Conclusion
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