Literature is the question minus the answer. — Roland Barthes
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 a state of culture, poetry is a state of grace, before and after culture. — Juan Ramon Jimenez
Literature is air, and Im suffocating in mediocrity. — Armand Assante
Literature is the supreme means by which you renew your sensuous and emotional life and learn a new awareness. — F. R. Leavis
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
We write from life and call it literature, and literature lives because we are in it. — F. Sionil José
Literature overtakes history, for literature gives you more than one life. It expands experience and opens new opportunities to readers. — Carlos Fuentes
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 has the power to change lives, minds, and hearts. — Cam'ron
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
If a nation's literature declines, the nation atrophies and decays. — Ezra Pound
Literature is a form of permanent insurrection. Its mission is to arouse, to disturb, to alarm, to keep men in a constant state of dissatisfaction with themselves. — Mario Vargas Llosa
The Arab world also won the Nobel with me. I believe that international doors have opened, and that from now on, literate people will consider Arab literature also. We deserve that recognition. — Naguib Mahfouz
Brave New World Quotes
It seems that our brave new world is becoming less tolerant, spiritual and educated than it ever was when I was young. — Lemmy Kilmister
One believes things because one has been conditioned to believe them. — Aldous Huxley
Words can be like X-rays if you use them properly -- they’ll go through anything. You read and you’re pierced. — Aldous Huxley
Hug me till you drug me, honey; Kiss me till I'm in a coma. — Aldous Huxley
Great is truth, but still greater, from a practical point of view, is silence about truth. — Aldous Huxley
The world will not be destroyed by those who do evil, but by those who watch them without doing anything.
On no account brood over your wrongdoing. Rolling in the muck is not the best way of getting clean. — Aldous Huxley
There isn't a child who hasn't gone out into the brave new world who eventually doesn't return to the old homestead carrying a bundle of dirty clothes. — Art Buchwald
Did you ever feel, as though you had something inside you that was only waiting for you to give it a chance to come out? Some sort of extra power that you aren't using - you know, like all the water that goes down the falls instead of through the turbines? — Aldous Huxley
Back to culture. Yes, actually to culture. You can’t consume much if you sit still and read books. — Aldous Huxley
Literary Worlds Quotes
Classical quotation is the parole of literary men all over the world. — Samuel Johnson
Sex in a woman's world has the same currency a penny has in a man's. Every penny saved is a penny earned in one world and in the next every sexual adventure is a literary experience. — Harry Golden
Used books are the sluts of the literary world. Passed around from person to person, spreading their pages for anyone, getting cheaper and cheaper until eventually they end up in prison. — Stephen Colbert
I fear the day that technology will surpass our human interaction. The world will have a generation of idiots.
I realized early on that the academy and the literary world alike — Harold Bloom
We writers - we're the snowflakes of the literary world. We each have our own shape. — Alice Walker
The biggest misconception that people have about the literary life is the romance of it. That a writer has this large world available to him or her of people, of ideas, of experiences, of interchange of ideas... — Walter Mosley
The world is changed by your example, not by your opinion.
There's a socialist bias to the consensus of the literary world: a '30s mentality that says factory workers are more worthy of our attention. — Jay McInerney
Once one is caught up into the material world not one person in ten thousand finds the time to form literary taste, to examine the validity of philosophic concepts for himself, or to form what, for lack of a better phrase, I might call the wise and tragic sense of life. — Unknown
Once one is caught up into the material world not one person in ten thousand finds the time to form literary taste, to examine the validity of philosophic concepts for himself, or to form what, for lack of a better phrase, I might call the wise and tragic sense of life. — F. Scott Fitzgerald
The literary world is made up of little confederacies, each looking upon its own members as the lights of the universe; and considering all others as mere transient meteors, doomed to soon fall and be forgotten, while its own luminaries are to shine steadily into immortality. — Washington Irving
Literary Quotes
If the literature we are reading does not wake us, why then do we read it? A literary work must be an ice-axe to break the sea frozen inside us. — Franz Kafka
What a newspaper needs in its news, in its headlines, and on its editorial page is terseness, humor, descriptive power, satire, originality, good literary style, clever condensation and accuracy, accuracy, accuracy. — Joseph Pulitzer
So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past. — F. Scott Fitzgerald
The grounding in natural sciences which I obtained in the course of my medical studies, including preliminary examinations in botany, zoology, physics, and chemistry, was to become decisive in determining the trend of my literary work. — Johannes V. Jensen
The grounding in natural sciences which I obtained in the course of my medical studies, including preliminary examinations in botany, zoology, physics, and chemistry, was to become decisive in determining the trend of my literary work. — Johannes Vilhelm Jensen
Let us learn to show our friendship for a man when he is alive and not after he is dead. — F. Scott Fitzgerald
Women need to become literary "criminals," break the literary laws and reinvent their own, because the established laws prevent women from presenting the reality of their lives. — Kathy Acker
It was less a literary thing than a linguistic, philosophical preoccupation... discovering how far you can go with language to create immediate, elementary experience. — Robert Morgan
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
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
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
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
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
It’s not rocket science. It’s social science – the science of understanding people’s needs and their unique relationship with art, literature, history, music, work, philosophy, community, technology and psychology. The act of design is structuring and creating that balance. — Clement Mok
It takes a great deal of history to produce a little literature. — Henry James
In schoolbooks and in literature we can separate ecclesiastical and political history; in the life of mankind they are intertwined. — Leopold Von Ranke
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
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
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
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
Love Literature Quotes
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
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
Generally, by the time you are Real, most of your hair has been loved off, and your eyes drop out and you get loose in the joints and very shabby. But these things don't matter at all, because once you are Real you can't be ugly, except to people who don't understand. — Margery Williams
Modern Literature Quotes
Attention-deficit disorders seem to abound in modern society, and we don't know the cause. — Marilyn vos Savant
Perversity is the muse of modern literature. — Susan Sontag
All modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn. — Ernest Hemingway
Without books, history is silent, literature dumb, science crippled. — Barbara Tuchman
Magic Realism is not new. The label's new, the specific Latin American form of it is new, its modern popularity is new, but it's been around as long as literature has been around. — Terri Windling
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
Modern American literature was born in protest, born in rebellion, born out of the sense of loss and indirection which was imposed upon the new generations out of the realization that the old formal culture-the "New England idea"-could no longer serve. — Alfred Kazin
The truth is rarely pure and never simple. Modern life would be very tedious if it were either, and modern literature a complete impossibility! — Oscar Wilde
The two World Wars came in part, like much modern literature and art, because men, whose nature is to tire of everything in turn... tired of common sense and civilization. — F. L. Lucas
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
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
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
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
As a young writer, I was on guard against the Latina in me, the Spanish in me because as far as I could see the models that were presented to me did not include my world. In fact, 'I was told by one teacher in college that one could only write poetry in the language in which one first said Mother. That left me out of American literature, for sure. — Julia Alvarez
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
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
People will do anything, no matter how absurd, in order to avoid facing their own souls. They will practice Indian yoga and all its exercises, observe a strict regimen of diet, learn the literature of the whole world - all because they cannot get on with themselves and have not the slightest faith that anything useful could ever come out of their own souls. — Carl Jung
Develop an interest in life as you see it; the people, things, literature, music - the world is so rich, simply throbbing with rich treasures, beautiful souls and interesting people. Forget yourself. — Henry Miller
Theatre for a New Audience is one of America's most admirable and exciting theatre companites...some of the best acted and directed work to be found on American stages, engaging with the canon of world dramatic literature in a vigorous way. — Tony Kushner
The beautification of the world is not a work of nature, but a work of art, then it involves an artist. — Gilbert K. Chesterton
Do come back and draw the ferrets, they are the most lovely noble darlings in the world. — D. H. Lawrence
One of the greatest gifts my brother and I received from my mother was her love of literature and language. With their boundless energy, libraries open the door to these worlds and so many others. I urge young and old alike to embrace all that libraries have to offer. — Caroline Kennedy
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
If you are to reach masses of people in this world, you must do it by a sign language. Whether your vehicle be commerce, literature, or politics, you can do nothing but raise signals, and make motions to the people. — John Jay Chapman
The world of literature is a world where there is no reality except that of the human imagination. — Northrop Frye
Email, instant messaging, and cell phones give us fabulous communication ability, but because we live and work in our own little worlds, that communication is totally disorganized. — Marilyn vos Savant
Translators are the shadow heroes of literature, the often forgotten instruments that make it possible for different cultures to talk to one another, who have enabled us to understand that we all, from every part of the world, live in one world. — Paul Auster
Keyholes are the occasions of more sin and wickedness, than all other holes in this world put together. — Laurence Sterne
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
My works are Chinese literature, which is part of world literature. They show the life of Chinese people as well as the country's unique culture and folk customs. — Mo Yan
Children’s literature must build a bridge between the colorful dream world full of fantasy and illusion, and a tougher real world full of twists and turns. The child armed with the torch of knowledge, awareness and guidance must cross this bridge and set foot to the intense harshness of the bigger world. — Samad Behrangi
From that time on, the world was hers for the reading. She would never be lonely again, never miss the lack of intimate friends. Books became her friends and there was one for every mood. — Betty Smith
Literature has been the salvation of the damned, literature has inspired and guided lovers, routed despair and can perhaps in this case save the world. — John Cheever
Literature, fiction, poetry, whatever, makes justice in the world. That's why it almost always has to be on the side of the underdog. — Grace Paley
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
Reading honest literature makes you love the world. Knowledge and understanding are love. Reading educates our feelings and enhances our sympathy. When you read for understanding, you are fundamentally changed. You are a different person at the end of the story or the novel than you were when it began. — John Dufresne
One of the strange things about living in the world is that it is only now and then one is quite sure one is going to live forever and ever and ever. — Frances Hodgson Burnett
Literature is the safe and traditional vehicle through which we learn about the world and pass on values from on generation to the next. Books save lives. — Laurie Anderson
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
Great literature, if we read it well, opens us up to the world and makes us more sensitive to it, as if we acquired eyes that could see through things and ears that could hear smaller sounds. — Donald Hall
All serious art, music, literature is a critical act. It is so, firstly, in the sense of Matthew Arnold's phrase: "a criticism of life." Be it realistic, fantastic, Utopian or satiric, the construct of the artist is a counter-statement to the world. — George Steiner
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
According to Muslim teachings, God first revealed His word in the Holy Qur'an to the prophet, Muhammad, during the month of Ramadan. That word has guided billions of believers across the centuries, and those believers built a culture of learning and literature and science. All the world continues to benefit from this faith and its achievements. — George W. Bush
Inequality may linger in the world of material things, but great music, great literature, great art and the wonders of science are, and should be, open to all. — Franklin D. Roosevelt
... not only dowomen sufferindignities in daily life, but the literature of the world proclaims their inferiority and divinely decreed subjection in all history, sacred and profane, in science, philosophy, poetry, and song. — Elizabeth Cady Stanton
In Conclusion
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