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Motivational Quotes

Literature

Our American professors like their literature clear and cold and pure and very dead.
- Lewis, Sinclair
Literature Motivational Quotes



Best Quotes about Literature

1.
Literature is the immortality of speech.
Schlegel, August Wilhelm Von

2.
Great literature cannot grow from a neglected or impoverished soil. Only if we actually tend or care will it transpire that every hundred years or so we might get a Middlemarch.
James, P. D.

3.
Literature is the orchestration of platitudes.
Wilder, Thornton

4.
The decline in literature indicates a decline in the nation. The two keep pace in their downward tendency.
Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

5.
All you can be sure about in a political-minded writer is that if his work should last you will have to skip the politics when you read it. Many of the so-called politically enlisted writers change their politics frequently . Perhaps it can be respected as a form of the pursuit of happiness.
Hemingway, Ernest

6.
Whoever has the luck to be born a character can laugh even at death. Because a character will never die! A man will die, a writer, the instrument of creation: but what he has created will never die!
Pirandello, Luigi

7.
Literature is the human activity that make the fullest and most precise account of variousness, possibility, complexity, and difficulty.
Trilling, Lionel

8.
Literature is a toil and a snare, a curse that bites deep.
Lawrence, D. H.

9.
Literature transforms and intensifies ordinary language, deviates systematically from everyday speech. If you approach me at a bus stop and murmur Thou still unravished bride of quietness, then I am instantly aware that I am in the presence of the literary.
Eagleton, Terry

10.
When a book, any sort of book, reaches a certain intensity of artistic performance it becomes literature. That intensity may be a matter of style, situation, character, emotional tone, or idea, or half a dozen other things. It may also be a perfection of control over the movement of a story similar to the control a great pitcher has over the ball.
Chandler, Raymond

11.
Only the more rugged mortals should attempt to keep up with current literature.
Age, George

12.
English literature is a kind of training in social ethics. English trains you to handle a body of information in a way that is conducive to action.
Butler, Marilyn

13.
Literary imagination is an aesthetic object offered by a writer to a lover of books.
Bachelard, Gaston

14.
The rest, called literature, is a dossier of human imbecility for the guidance of future professors.
Tzara, Tristan

15.
Great literature is simply language charged with meaning to the utmost possible degree.
Pound, Ezra

16.
If you look at history you'll find that no state has been so plagued by its rulers as when power has fallen into the hands of some dabbler in philosophy or literary addict.
Erasmus, Desiderius

17.
Now a writer can make himself a nice career while he is alive by espousing a political cause, working for it, making a profession of believing in it, and if it wins he will be very well placed. All politics is a matter of working hard without reward, or with a living wage for a time, in the hope of booty later. A man can be a Fascist or a Communist and if his outfit gets in he can get to be an ambassador or have a million copies of his books printed by the Government or any of the other rewards the boys dream about.
Hemingway, Ernest

18.
All modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn. American writing comes from that. There was nothing before. There has been nothing as good since.
Hemingway, Ernest

19.
There are events which are so great that if a writer has participated in them his obligation is to write truly rather than assume the presumption of altering them with invention.
Hemingway, Ernest

20.
There was a time when the average reader read a novel simply for the moral he could get out of it, and however na?ve that may have been, it was a good deal less na?ve than some of the limited objectives he has now. Today novels are considered to be entirely concerned with the social or economic or psychological forces that they will by necessity exhibit, or with those details of daily life that are for the good novelist only means to some deeper end.
O'Connor, Flannery

21.
If the most significant characteristic of man is the complex of biological needs he shares with all members of his species, then the best lives for the writer to observe are those in which the role of natural necessity is clearest, namely, the lives of the very poor.
Auden, W. H.

22.
There is a great discovery still to be made in literature, that of paying literary men by the quantity they do not write.
Carlyle, Thomas

23.
The truth is that literature, particularly fiction, is not the pure medium we sometimes assume it to be. Response to it is affected by things other than its own intrinsic quality; by a curiosity or lack of it about the people it deals with, their outlook, their way of life.
Palmer, Vance

24.
In literature, as in love, we are astonished at the choice made by other people.
Maurois, Andre

25.
The existence of good bad literature --the fact that one can be amused or excited or even moved by a book that one's intellect simply refuses to take seriously --is a reminder that art is not the same thing as cerebration.
Orwell, George

26.
When politicians and politically minded people pay too much attention to literature, it is a bad sign -- a bad sign mostly for literature. But it is also a bad sign when they don't want to hear the word mentioned.
Calvino, Italo

27.
Literature is the expression of a feeling of deprivation, a recourse against a sense of something missing. But the contrary is also true: language is what makes us human. It is a recourse against the meaningless noise and silence of nature and history.
Paz, Octavio

28.
Despair, feeding, as it always does, on phantasmagoria, is imperturbably leading literature to the rejection, en masse, of all divine and social laws, towards practical and theoretical evil.
Lautreamont, Isidore Ducasse, Comte De

29.
If a nation's literature declines, the nation atrophies and decays.
Pound, Ezra

30.
In our day the conventional element in literature is elaborately disguised by a law of copyright pretending that every work of art is an invention distinctive enough to be patented.
Frye, Northrop

31.
The function of literature, through all its mutations, has been to make us aware of the particularity of selves, and the high authority of the self in its quarrel with its society and its culture. Literature is in that sense subversive.
Trilling, Lionel

32.
Only those things are beautiful which are inspired by madness and written by reason.
Gide, Andre

33.
Literature is my Utopia. Here I am not disfranchised. No barrier of the senses shuts me out from the sweet, gracious discourse of my book-friends. They talk to me without embarrassment or awkwardness.
Keller, Helen

34.
As life grows more terrible, its literature grows more terrible.
Stevens, Wallace

35.
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.
Hamilton, Edith

36.
Our American professors like their literature clear and cold and pure and very dead.
Lewis, Sinclair

37.
Any historian of the literature of the modern age will take virtually for granted the adversary intention, the actually subversive intention, that characterizes modern writing -- he will perceive its clear purpose of detaching the reader from the habits of thought and feeling that the larger culture imposes, of giving him a ground and a vantage point from which to judge and condemn, and perhaps revise, the culture that produces him.
Trilling, Lionel

38.
The great standard of literature as to purity and exactness of style is the Bible.
Blair, Hugh

39.
In the electronic age, books, words and reading are not likely to remain sufficiently authoritative and central to knowledge to justify literature.
Kernan, Alvin

40.
Literature is a defense against the attacks of life. It says to life: You can't deceive me. I know your habits, foresee and enjoy watching all your reactions, and steal your secret by involving you in cunning obstructions that halt your normal flow.
Pavese, Cesare

41.
The present era grabs everything that was ever written in order to transform it into films, TV programs; or cartoons. What is essential in a novel is precisely what can only be expressed in a novel, and so every adaptation contains nothing but the non-essential. If a person is still crazy enough to write novels nowadays and wants to protect them, he has to write them in such a way that they cannot be adapted, in other words, in such a way that they cannot be retold.
Kundera, Milan

42.
One of the proud joys of the man of letters --if that man of letters is an artist is to feel within himself the power to immortalize at will anything he chooses to immortalize. Insignificant though he may be, he is conscious of possessing a creative divinity. God creates lives; the man of imagination creates fictional lives which may make a profound and as it were more living impression on the world's memory.
Goncourt, Edmond and Jules De

43.
There is an incompatibility between literary creation and political activity.
Llosa, Mario Vargas

44.
The pure work implies the disappearance of the poet as speaker, who hands over to the words.
Mallarme, Stephane

45.
Literature must become party literature. Down with unpartisan litterateurs! Down with the superman of literature! Literature must become a part of the general cause of the proletariat.
Lenin, Vladimir Ilyich

46.
By and large the literature of a democracy will never exhibit the order, regularity, skill, and art characteristic of aristocratic literature; formal qualities will be neglected or actually despised. The style will often be strange, incorrect, overburdened, and loose, and almost always strong and bold. Writers will be more anxious to work quickly than to perfect details. Short works will be commoner than long books, wit than erudition, imagination than depth. There will be a rude and untutored vigor of thought with great variety and singular fecundity. Authors will strive to astonish more than to please, and to stir passions rather than to charm taste.
Tocqueville, Alexis De

47.
The cultivation of literary pursuits forms the basis of all sciences, and in their perfection consist the reputation and prosperity of kingdoms.
Pombal, Marques De

48.
The art of letters will come to an end before A.D. 2000. I shall survive as a curiosity.
Pound, Ezra

49.
What is not in the open street is false, derived, that is to say, literature.
Miller, Henry

50.
Of course the illusion of art is to make one believe that great literature is very close to life, but exactly the opposite is true. Life is amorphous, literature is formal.
Sagan, Francoise


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