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Motivational Quotes

Literature

Literature exists at the same time in the modes of error and truth; it both betrays and obeys its own mode of being.
- Man, Paul De
Literature Motivational Quotes



Best Quotes about Literature

1.
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

2.
Literature is where I go to explore the highest and lowest places in human society and in the human spirit, where I hope to find not absolute truth but the truth of the tale, of the imagination and of the heart.
Rushdie, Salman

3.
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

4.
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

5.
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

6.
Already the writers are complaining that there is too much freedom. They need some pressure. The worse your daily life, the better your art. If you have to be careful because of oppression and censorship, this pressure produces diamonds.
Tolstaya, Tatyana

7.
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

8.
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

9.
What makes literature interesting is that it does not survive its translation. The characters in a novel are made out of the sentences. That's what their substance is.
Miller, Jonathan

10.
The attempt to devote oneself to literature alone is a most deceptive thing, and often, paradoxically, it is literature that suffers for it.
Havel, Vaclav

11.
Literature is the immortality of speech.
Schlegel, August Wilhelm Von

12.
Remarks are not literature.
Stein, Gertrude

13.
The party of God and the party of Literature have more in common than either will admit; their texts may conflict, but their bigotries coincide. Both insist on being the sole custodians of the true word and its only interpreters.
Raphael, Frederic

14.
A literary movement consists of five or six people who live in the same town and hate each other cordially.
Moore, George

15.
How simple the writing of literature would be if it were only necessary to write in another way what has been well written. It is because we have had such great writers in the past that a writer is driven far out past where he can go, out to where no one can help him.
Hemingway, Ernest

16.
The writer in western civilization has become not a voice of his tribe, but of his individuality. This is a very narrow-minded situation.
Appelfeld, Aharon

17.
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

18.
Literature flourishes best when it is half trade and half an art.
Inge, Dean William R.

19.
Literature is made upon any occasion that a challenge is put to the legal apparatus by conscience in touch with humanity.
Algren, Nelson

20.
The great standard of literature as to purity and exactness of style is the Bible.
Blair, Hugh

21.
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

22.
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

23.
Literature that is not the breath of contemporary society, that dares not transmit the pains and fears of that society, that does not warn in time against threatening moral and social dangers -- such literature does not deserve the name of literature; it is only a fa?ade. Such literature loses the confidence of its own people, and its published works are used as wastepaper instead of being read.
Solzhenitsyn, Alexander

24.
The rest, called literature, is a dossier of human imbecility for the guidance of future professors.
Tzara, Tristan

25.
In the present age, alas! our pens are ravished by unlettered authors and unmannered critics, that make a havoc rather than a building, a wilderness rather than a garden. But, a lack! what boots it to drop tears upon the preterit?
Beardsley, Aubrey

26.
The only privilege literature deserves -- and this privilege it requires in order to exist -- is the privilege of being in the arena of discourse, the place where the struggle of our languages can be acted out.
Rushdie, Salman

27.
The decline in literature indicates a decline in the nation. The two keep pace in their downward tendency.
Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

28.
The art of letters will come to an end before A.D. 2000. I shall survive as a curiosity.
Pound, Ezra

29.
Nothing could be more inappropriate to American literature than its English source since the Americans are not British in sensibility.
Stevens, Wallace

30.
In literature, as in love, we are astonished at the choice made by other people.
Maurois, Andre

31.
When we read of human beings behaving in certain ways, with the approval of the author, who gives his benediction to this behavior by his attitude towards the result of the behavior arranged by himself, we can be influenced towards behaving in the same way.
Eliot, T. S.

32.
One learns little more about a man from his feats of literary memory than from the feats of his alimentary canal.
Colby, Frank Moore

33.
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

34.
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.

35.
How has the human spirit ever survived the terrific literature with which it has had to contend?
Stevens, Wallace

36.
There is an incompatibility between literary creation and political activity.
Llosa, Mario Vargas

37.
It is the story-teller's task to elicit sympathy and a measure of understanding for those who lie outside the boundaries of State approval.
Greene, Graham

38.
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

39.
Only two classes of books are of universal appeal. The very best and the very worst.
Ford, Ford Madox

40.
Professors of literature, who for the most part are genteel but mediocre men, can make but a poor defense of their profession, and the professors of science, who are frequently men of great intelligence but of limited interests and education
Winters, Yvor

41.
I really do inhabit a system in which words are capable of shaking the entire structure of government, where words can prove mightier than ten military divisions.
Havel, Vaclav

42.
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

43.
In literature the ambition of the novice is to acquire the literary language: the struggle of the adept is to get rid of it.
Shaw, George Bernard

44.
Do not worry about the incarnation of ideas. If you are a poet, your works will contain them without your knowledge -- they will be both moral and national if you follow your inspiration freely.
Belinsky, Vissarion

45.
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

46.
The pure work implies the disappearance of the poet as speaker, who hands over to the words.
Mallarme, Stephane

47.
Just as it is true that a stream cannot rise above its source, so it is true that a national literature cannot rise above the moral level of the social conditions of the people from whom it derives its inspiration.
Connolly, James

48.
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

49.
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

50.
Literature is the orchestration of platitudes.
Wilder, Thornton


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