literature quotes
So we have the Philistine of genius in religionLuther; the Philistine of genius in politicsCromwell; the Philistine of genius in literatureBunyan.
Hebelievesthat sciencefictionistheapocalyptic literature of the 20th century, the authentic language of Auschwitz, Eniwetok and Aldermaston.He also believes that inner space, not outer, isthe real subject of science fiction.
If photography is allowed to stand in forart in some of its functions it will soon supplant or corrupt it completely thankstothenatural support it will find inthestupidityof themultitude.It must return toits real task, which isto be the servant of the sciences and the arts, but the very humble servant, like printing and shorthand which have neither created nor supplanted literature.
No wonder the really powerful men in our society, whether politicians or scientists, hold writers in contempt.Theydoit becausetheyget no evidence from modern literature that anybody is thinking about any significant question.
The Breed never dies. Sapper, Buchan, Dornford Yates, practitioners in that school of Snobbery withViolence that runs like a thread of good-class tweed through twentieth-century literature.
Los metaf|sicos de Tl o« n no buscan la verdad ni siquiera la verosimilitud: buscan el asombro. Juzgan que la metaf|sica es una rama de la literatura fanta stica. The metaphysicians of Tlo« n do not seek for the truth or even for verisimilitude, but rather for the astounding. They judge that metaphysics is a branch of fantastic literature.
Literature is a luxury; fiction is a necessity.
What is art is not likely to be decided for decades or longer after the work has been producedand then is often redecidedso we must not think badly if we regard literature as entertainment rather than as transcendent enlightenment.
Literature istheart of writing something that will be read twice; journalism what will be read once.
Literature is a power line and the motor, mark you, is the reader.
If I were a writer, how I would enjoy being told the novel is dead.How liberating to work in the margins, outside a central perception.Youaretheghoul of literature.Lovely.
Books, we are told, propose to instruct or to amuse. Indeed! The true antithesisto knowledge, in this case, is not pleasure, but power. All that is literature seeks to communicate power; all that is not literature, to communicate knowledge.
EDUCATION.At Mr Wackford Squeers's Academy, Dotheboys Hall, at the delightful village of Dotheboys, near Greta Bridge inYorkshire.Youth are boarded, clothed, booked, furnished with pocket-money, providedwith all necessaries, instructed inall languages, living and dead, mathematics, orthography, geometry, astronomy, trigonometry, the use of the globes, algebra, single stick (if required), writing, arithmetic, fortification, and every other branch of classical literature. Terms, twenty guineas per annum. No extras, no vacations, and diet unparalleled.
You know who the critics are? The men who have failed in literature and art.
We know too much and are convinced of too little.Our literature is a substitute for religion, and so is our religion.
The people which ceases to care for its literary inheritance becomes barbaric; the people which ceases to produce literature ceases to move in thought and sensibility.
Literature is conscious mythology: as society develops, its mythical stories become structural principles of story-telling, its mythical concepts, sun-gods and the like, become habits of metaphoric thought. In a fully mature literary tradition the writerenters intoa structure of traditional stories and images.
No se le hab|a ocurrido pensar hasta entonces que la literatura fuera el mejor juguete que se hab|a inventado para burlarse de la gente. It had never occurred to him until then to think that literature was the best plaything that had ever been invented to make fun of people.
C'est avec de beaux sentiments qu'on fait de la mauvaise litte rature. Bad literature is written with beautiful sentiments.
Le plagiat est la base de toutes les litte ratures, excepte de la premie' re, qui d'ailleurs est inconnue. Plagiarism is the base of all literature except the first text which, however, is unknown.
Nine-tenths of English poetic literature is the result either of vulgar careerism, or of a poet trying to keep his hand in. Most poets are dead by their late twenties.
Show me an enemy of literature, and I will show him my accounts.
Ina real sense, peoplewhohavereadgood literaturehave lived more than people who cannot or will not read.
God knows people who are paid to have attitudes toward things, professional critics, make me sick: camp- following eunuchs of literature.
All modernAmericanliterature comesfromonebook by MarkTwain called Huckleberry Finn. American writing comes from that. There was nothing before. There has been nothing good since.
It takes a great deal of history to produce a little literature.
Today's literature: prescriptions written by patients.
Le mensonge et les vers de tout temps sont amis. Lies and literature have always been friends.
The classics are only primitive literature. They belong to the same class as primitive machineryand primitive music and primitive medicine.
She was thinkingfor, since she had been formed by literature, she could think in no other waythat all this had been described in Dickens,Tolstoy, Hugo, Dostoevsky, and a dozen others. All that noble and terrific indignation had done nothing, achieved nothing, the shout of anger from the nineteenth century might as well have been silentfor here came the file of prisoners, handcuffed two by two, and on their faces was that same immemorial look of patient, sardonic understanding.
In other countries, art and literature are left to a lot of shabby bums living in attics and feeding on booze and spaghetti, but in America the successful writer or picture-painter is indistinguishable from any other decent business man.
Our American professors like their literature clear and cold and pure and very dead.
Literature has a lot to answer for, where concepts of the countryside are concerned.
Literature ismostlyabout having sex and not muchabout having children. Life is the other way round.
Movies are more likely than literature to reach deep feelings in people.
We sing the love of danger.Courage, rashness, and rebellion are the elements of our poetry. Hitherto literature has tended to exalt thoughtful immobility, ecstasy, and sleep, whereas we are for aggressive movement, febrile insomnia, mortal leaps, and blows with the fist.We proclaim that the world is richer for a new beautyof speed, and our praise isfor themanat the wheel. There is no beauty now save in struggle, no masterpiece can be anything but aggressive, and hence we glorify war, militarism and patriotism.
Literatureis lonely and waited for, brilliant and pure and frightened, a marriage of birds, a conversation of the blind.
We have to acknowledge that the thing we call 'literature' ismorepluralisticnow, just associetyoughtto be. The melting pot never worked.
I have always wanted to develop a way of writing that was irrevocably black. I don't have the resources of a musician but I thought that if it was truly black literature, it would not be black because Iwas, it would notevenbe black because of its subject matter. It would be something intrinsic, indigenous, something in the way it was put togetherthe sentences, the structure, texture and toneso that anyone who read it would realize.
The curse of Scottish literature is the lack of a whole language, which finally means the lack of a whole mind.
One thing that literature would be greatly the better for Would be a more restricted employment by authors of simile and metaphor.
English literature's performing flea.
If we turn to early Irish literature, as we naturally may, to see what sort of people the Irish were in the infancy of the race, we find ourselves wandering in delighted bewilderment through a darkness shot with lightning and purple flame.
The high-water mark, so to speak, of Socialist literature is W.H. Auden, a sort of gutless Kipling.
Literature is doomed if liberty of thought perishes.
Name me one character in literature or drama who can't be described as neurotic We wouldn't want to know the people we get to see on the stage. How would you like to have Medea for dinner? Or Macbeth slurping your soup? Or Oedipus with his bloody, blinded eyes dripping all over your tablecloth?
Literature, fiction, poetry, whatever, makes justice in the world.That'swhy it almost alwayshastobe onthesideof the underdog.
The affair between Margot Asquith and Margot Asquith will live as one of the prettiest love stories inall literature.
The pimple on the face of American literature.
I never mentioned a man but with the view Of selling my own works. The tip's a good one, as for literature It gives no man a sinecure.
Great literature is simply language charged with meaning to the utmost possible degree.
Literature is news that news.
If evil does not exist, what isgoing to happen to literature?
Literature is not an abstract science, to which exact definitions can be applied.It is an Art rather, the success of which depends on personal persuasiveness, on the author's skill to give as on ours to receive.
Beware of anything that promises freedom or enlightenmenttraps for eager and clever foolsa dog has a keener noseevery creature in a cave can justify himself. Three-fourths of philosophyand literature is the talk of people trying to convince themselves that they really like the cage they were tricked into entering.
Perversity is the muse of modern literature.
Your true lover of literature is never fastidious.
Hehadaddedtohisstoriesa littlestoryofmeditationsand inthesehesaidthat The Enormous Roomwasthegreatest book he had ever read. It was then that Gertrude Stein said,Hemingway, remarks are not literature.
Literature is based not on life but on propositions about life, of which this is one.
A louse in the locks of literature.
They lead, as a matter of fact, an existence of jumpiness and apprehension. They sit on the edge of the chair of Literature. In the house of Life they have the feeling that they have never taken off their overcoats.
The function of literature through all its mutations, has been to make us aware of the particularity of selves, and thehigh authorityof theself in its quarrel with its society and its culture. Literature is in that sense subversive.
Is it not singular how some men continue to obtain the reputation of popular authorship without adding a word to the literature of their country worthy of note? To puff and to get one's self puffed have become different branches of a new profession.
I don't know anything that mars good literature so completelyas too much truth.
Il faut n'appeler Science que l'ensemble des recettes qui re ussissent toujours.Tout le reste est litte rature. Science means simply the aggregate of all the recipes that are always successful. All the rest is literature.
Por que esos personajes que se serv|an de la literatura como adorno o pretexto iban a ser ma s escritores que Pedro Camacho, quien so lo viv|a para escribir? Porque Vaughan ellos hab|an le|do (o, al menos, sab|an que deber|an haber le|do) a Proust, a Faulker, a Joyce, y Pedro Camacho era poco ma s que un analfabeto? Why should those persons who used literature as an ornament or pretext have any more right to be considered real writers than Pedro Camacho, who lived only to write? Because they had read (or at least knew thattheyshould haveread) Proust,Faulkner,Joyce, while Pedro Camacho was very nearly illiterate?
Que ton vers soit la bonne aventure EŁ parse au vent crispe du matin Qui va fleurant la menthe et le thym. Et tout le reste est litte rature. May your verse be a glorious adventure Strewn by the crisp morning air Which helps the mint and the thyme grow. Everything else is mere literature.
Particularly against books the Home Secretary is. If we can't stamp out literature in the country, we can at least stop it being brought in from outside.
Literature is the orchestration of platitudes.
Literature is strewn with the wreckage of men who have minded beyond reason the opinion of others.
Webster's New World Dictionary of Quotations Copyright © 2010 by Chambers Harrap Publishers Ltd. All rights reserved. Published by Wiley, Hoboken, NJ. Used by arrangement with John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
Learn more about literature