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Motivational Quotes

Literature

Literature could be said to be a sort of disciplined technique for arousing certain emotions.
- Murdoch, Iris
Literature Motivational Quotes



Best Quotes about Literature

1.
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

2.
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

3.
Literature always anticipates life. It does not copy it, but moulds it to its purpose. The nineteenth century, as we know it, is largely an invention of Balzac.
Wilde, Oscar

4.
Perversity is the muse of modern literature.
Sontag, Susan

5.
The atmosphere of orthodoxy is always damaging to prose, and above all it is completely ruinous to the novel, the most anarchical of all forms of literature.
Orwell, George

6.
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

7.
That is a very good question. I don't know the answer. But can you tell me the name of a classical Greek shoemaker?
Miller, Arthur

8.
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

9.
Literature is analysis after the event.
Lessing, Doris

10.
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

11.
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

12.
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

13.
It is not the first duty of the novelist to provide blueprints for insurrection, or uplifting tales of successful resistance for the benefit of the opposition. The naming of what is there is what is important.
Mcewan, Ian

14.
The thing that teases the mind over and over for years, and at last gets itself put down rightly on paper -- whether little or great, it belongs to Literature.
Jewett, Sarah Orne

15.
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

16.
Literary imagination is an aesthetic object offered by a writer to a lover of books.
Bachelard, Gaston

17.
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!
Lawrence, D. H.

18.
Literature is without proofs. By which it must be understood that it cannot prove, not only what it says, but even that it is worth the trouble of saying it.
Barthes, Roland

19.
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

20.
Literature is made upon any occasion that a challenge is put to the legal apparatus by conscience in touch with humanity.
Algren, Nelson

21.
Our American professors like their literature clear and cold and pure and very dead.
Lewis, Sinclair

22.
Only those things are beautiful which are inspired by madness and written by reason.
Gide, Andre

23.
In literature, as in love, we are astonished at the choice made by other people.
Maurois, Andre

24.
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.

25.
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

26.
Learning why one great book is just like every other great book is the key to understanding literature
Moschitta, John

27.
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

28.
How has the human spirit ever survived the terrific literature with which it has had to contend?
Stevens, Wallace

29.
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

30.
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

31.
It is a good lesson --though it may often be a hard one --for a man who has dreamed of literary fame, and of making for himself a rank among the world's dignitaries by such means, to step aside out of the narrow circle in which his claims are recognized, and to find how utterly devoid of all significance, beyond that circle, is all that he achieves, and all he aims at.
Hawthorne, Nathaniel

32.
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

33.
I am not a literary man. I am a man of science, and I am interested in that branch of Anthropology which deals with the history of human speech.
Murray, Jim

34.
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

35.
Just as the office worker dreams of murdering his hated boss and so is saved from really murdering him, so it is with the author; with his great dreams he helps his readers to survive, to avoid their worst intentions. And society, without realizing it respects and even exalts him, albeit with a kind of jealousy, fear and even repulsion, since few people want to discover the horrors that lurk in the depths of their souls. This is the highest mission of great literature, and there is no other.
Sabato, Ernesto

36.
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

37.
The struggle of literature is in fact a struggle to escape from the confines of language; it stretches out from the utmost limits of what can be said; what stirs literature is the call and attraction of what is not in the dictionary.
Calvino, Italo

38.
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

39.
Only the more rugged mortals should attempt to keep up with current literature.
Age, George

40.
The decline in literature indicates a decline in the nation. The two keep pace in their downward tendency.
Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

41.
The great standard of literature as to purity and exactness of style is the Bible.
Blair, Hugh

42.
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

43.
If literature isn't everything, it's not worth a single hour of someone's trouble.
Sartre, Jean-Paul

44.
The only sensible ends of literature are, first, the pleasurable toil of writing; second, the gratification of one's family and friends; and lastly, the solid cash.
Hawthorne, Nathaniel

45.
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.

46.
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

47.
There is an incompatibility between literary creation and political activity.
Llosa, Mario Vargas

48.
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

49.
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

50.
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


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