Mobsea Logo
Home

Motivational Quotes

Literature

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
Literature Motivational Quotes



Best Quotes about Literature

1.
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

2.
Remarks are not literature.
Stein, Gertrude

3.
Only the more rugged mortals should attempt to keep up with current literature.
Age, George

4.
The self-styled intellectual who is impotent with pen and ink hungers to write history with sword and blood.
Hoffer, Eric

5.
To provoke dreams of terror in the slumber of prosperity has become the moral duty of literature.
Fischer, Ernst

6.
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

7.
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

8.
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

9.
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

10.
For a novelist, a given historic situation is an anthropologic laboratory in which he explores his basic question: What is human existence?
Kundera, Milan

11.
The greatest masterpiece in literature is only a dictionary out of order.
Cocteau, Jean

12.
In literature, as in love, we are astonished at the choice made by other people.
Maurois, Andre

13.
There is an incompatibility between literary creation and political activity.
Llosa, Mario Vargas

14.
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

15.
If a nation's literature declines, the nation atrophies and decays.
Pound, Ezra

16.
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

17.
Literature is analysis after the event.
Lessing, Doris

18.
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

19.
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

20.
A good metaphor is something even the police should keep an eye on.
Lichtenberg, Georg C.

21.
Nothing could be more inappropriate to American literature than its English source since the Americans are not British in sensibility.
Stevens, Wallace

22.
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

23.
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

24.
What is not in the open street is false, derived, that is to say, literature.
Miller, Henry

25.
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

26.
Literature is not exhaustible, for the sufficient and simple reason that a single book is not. A book is not an isolated entity: it is a narration, an axis of innumerable narrations. One literature differs from another, either before or after it, not so much because of the text as for the manner in which it is read.
Borges, Jorge Luis

27.
Literature does not exist in a vacuum. Writers as such have a definite social function exactly proportional to their ability as writers. This is their main use.
Pound, Ezra

28.
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

29.
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

30.
A great number of the disappointments and mishaps of the troubled world are the direct result of literature and the allied arts. It is our belief that no human being who devotes his life and energy to the manufacture of fantasies can be anything but fundamentally inadequate
Hampton, Christopher

31.
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

32.
There can be no literary equivalent to truth.
Riding, Laura

33.
The rest, called literature, is a dossier of human imbecility for the guidance of future professors.
Tzara, Tristan

34.
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

35.
Leisure without literature is death and burial alive.
Seneca

36.
Literature, as a field of glory, is an arena where a tomb may be more easily found than laurels; and as a means of support, it is the chance of chances.
Giles, Henry

37.
Perversity is the muse of modern literature.
Sontag, Susan

38.
The decline in literature indicates a decline in the nation. The two keep pace in their downward tendency.
Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

39.
Literary imagination is an aesthetic object offered by a writer to a lover of books.
Bachelard, Gaston

40.
As life grows more terrible, its literature grows more terrible.
Stevens, Wallace

41.
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

42.
The artist is of no importance. Only what he creates is important, since there is nothing new to be said. Shakespeare, Balzac, Homer have all written about the same things, and if they had lived one thousand or two thousand years longer, the publishers wouldn't have needed anyone since.
Faulkner, William

43.
Literature flourishes best when it is half trade and half an art.
Inge, Dean William R.

44.
Our American professors like their literature clear and cold and pure and very dead.
Lewis, Sinclair

45.
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

46.
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.

47.
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

48.
Henry James seems most entirely in his element, doing that is to say what everything favors his doing, when it is a question of recollection. The mellow light which swims over the past, the beauty which suffuses even the commonest little figures of that
Woolf, Virginia

49.
All literature is political.
Burton, LeVar

50.
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


Daily Inspirational Quotes on

The wisdom of the wise, and the experience of ages, may be preserved by Motivational Quotes.
Quotes on Ability
Achievement
Acting and actors
Action
Adversity
Quotes on Advertising
Advice
Age
Age and aging
Alcohol and alcoholism
Quotes on Ambition
America
Anger
Animals
Appearance
Quotes on Argument
Art
Atheism
Attitude
Beauty
Quotes on Belief
Body
Books
Books - reading
Bores and boredom
Quotes on Business
Change
Character
Charity
Children
Quotes on Choice
Christians and christianity
Churches
Civilization
Colleges and universities
Quotes on Commitment
Common sense
Communication
Communism and socialism
Competition
Quotes on Complaints and complaining
Computers
Concentration
Confidence
Conflict
Quotes on Contentment
Control
Conversation
Cooperation
Courage
Quotes on Creativity
Crime and criminals
Criticism
Culture
Death
Quotes on Education
Effort
Enemies
Enthusiasm
Equality
Quotes on Evil
Evolution
Example
Excellence
Expectation
Quotes on Experience
Facts
Failure
Faith
Fame
Quotes on Family
Fashion
Fate
Fear
Feminism
Quotes on Fiction
Focus
Food
Food and eating
Fools and foolishness
Quotes on Forgiveness
Freedom
Friends and friendship
Friendship
Genius
Quotes on Giving
Goals
God
Goodness
Gossip
Quotes on Government
Gratitude
Greatness
Grief
Growth
Quotes on Habit
Happiness
Hatred
Health
Heaven
Quotes on Heroes and heroism
History and historians
Hollywood
Home
Honesty
Quotes on Honor
Hope
Humankind
Humility
Humor
Quotes on Ideas
Ignorance
Imagination
Individuality
Integrity
Quotes on Intelligence and intellectuals
Jesus christ
Journalism and journalists
Joy
Judgment and judges
Quotes on Justice
Kindness
Knowledge
Language
Laughter
Quotes on Law and lawyers
Laziness
Leadership
Learning
Liberty
Quotes on Lies and lying
Life
Listening
Literature
Loneliness
Quotes on Losers and losing
Love
Luck
Management
Manners
Quotes on Marriage
Media
Medicine
Memory
Men
Quotes on Mind
Mistakes
Money
Morality
Mothers
Quotes on Motivation
Music
Nations
Nature
Obstacles
Quotes on Opinions
Opportunity
Optimism
Pain
Parents and parenting
Quotes on Passion
Past
Patience
Patriotism
Peace
Quotes on People
Perfection
Perseverance
Persuasion
Philosophers and philosophy
Quotes on Photography
Planning
Pleasure
Poetry and poets
Politics
Quotes on Possibilities
Potential
Poverty and the poor
Power
Praise
Quotes on Prayer
Prejudice
Present
Pride
Problems
Quotes on Procrastination
Progress
Proverbs
Purpose
Quotations
Quotes on Reality
Reason
Relationship
Religion
Reputation
Quotes on Respectability
Responsibility
Riches
Risk
Science
Quotes on Secrets
Security
Self-esteem
Service
Silence
Quotes on Simplicity
Sin
Sleep
Society
Solitude
Quotes on Speakers and speaking
Speech
Spirituality
Success
Suffering
Quotes on Talent
Taxes and taxation
Teacher
The future
Theater
Quotes on Things and little things
Thoughts and thinking
Time
Travel
Trust
Quotes on Truth
Twentieth century
Understanding
Victory
Virtue
Quotes on Vision
War
Wealth
Winners and winning
Wisdom
Quotes on Wives
Women
Words
Work
World
Quotes on Worry
Writers and writing
Writing
Youth

Test your English Language
Best Gadgets For Summer Travel
Deadliest Diseases in human history
The Best Bulletproof Cars
Beautiful National Parks Around the World
The worlds Fastest Limousine
Awesome Mental Health Resources
Human Body Facts
Precautions while using Microwaves
Weird Vegetables
Valentines Day Dessert Recipes
What to Eat in Dadra and Nagar Haveli
Most Unique Bridges In The World
Most Intense Sports of the Ancient World
Most Expensive Divorces In History
Benefits of Quince
Cartoon Characters
Cartoons Characters That You Wish Were Real
Celebration of Dhanteras