Motivational Quotes

Literature

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

Best Quotes about Literature

With a pen in my hand I have successfully stormed bulwarks from which others armed with sword and excommunication have been repulsed.

Lichtenberg, Georg C.

A losing trade, I assure you, sir: literature is a drug.

Borrow, George

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

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

Hoffer, Eric

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

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

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

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

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

10.

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

11.

The difference between literature and journalism is that journalism is unreadable and literature is not read.

Wilde, Oscar

12.

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

13.

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

14.

Perversity is the muse of modern literature.

Sontag, Susan

15.

Literature is a toil and a snare, a curse that bites deep.

Lawrence, D. H.

16.

Literature could be said to be a sort of disciplined technique for arousing certain emotions.

Murdoch, Iris

17.

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

18.

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

19.

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

20.

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

21.

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

22.

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

Moore, George

23.

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.

24.

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

25.

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

26.

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

27.

Literature is the orchestration of platitudes.

Wilder, Thornton

28.

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

29.

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

30.

Only those things are beautiful which are inspired by madness and written by reason.

Gide, Andre

31.

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

Algren, Nelson

32.

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

33.

As life grows more terrible, its literature grows more terrible.

Stevens, Wallace

34.

The decline in literature indicates a decline in the nation. The two keep pace in their downward tendency.

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

35.

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

36.

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

37.

Literature... is condemned (or privileged) to be forever the most rigorous and, consequently, the most reliable of terms in which man names and transforms himself.

Man, Paul De

38.

The great standard of literature as to purity and exactness of style is the Bible.

Blair, Hugh

39.

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.

40.

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

41.

A good essay must have this permanent quality about it; it must draw its curtain round us, but it must be a curtain that shuts us in not out.

Woolf, Virginia

42.

All literature is political.

Burton, LeVar

43.

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.

44.

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

Kundera, Milan

45.

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

46.

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

47.

Literature is the immortality of speech.

Schlegel, August Wilhelm Von

48.

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

Mallarme, Stephane

49.

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

50.

Leisure without literature is death and burial alive.

Seneca