Literature famous quotes

Intimate relationships are a gold mine for literature to explore, to understand, to describe.
-- A. B. Yehoshua

#Gold #Literature #Intimate

For me, baseball is the most nourishing game outside of literature. They both are re-tellings of human experience.
-- A. Bartlett Giamatti

#Baseball #Games #Literature

Great literature should do some good to the reader: must quicken his perception though dull, and sharpen his discrimination though blunt, and mellow the rawness of his personal opinions.
-- A. E. Housman

#Perception #Literature #Dull

A script is not a piece of literature it's a process.
-- Abel Ferrara

#Pieces #Literature #Scripts

I like my coffee with cream and my literature with optimism.
-- Abigail Reynolds

#Coffee #Optimism #Literature

Absurdly improbable things are quite as liable to happen in real life as in weak literature.
-- Ada Leverson

#Real #Literature #Unexpected

It is always in season for old men to learn.
-- Aeschylus

#Education #Men #Literature

In the lack of judgment great harm arises, but one vote cast can set right a house.
-- Aeschylus

#House #Literature #Vote

He who goes unenvied shall not be admired.
-- Aeschylus

#Envy #Literature #Admiration

You have been trapped in the inescapable net of ruin by your own want of sense.
-- Aeschylus

#Literature #Want #Ruins

Justice turns the scale, bringing to some learning through suffering.
-- Aeschylus

#Justice #Suffering #Literature

I know how men in exile feed on dreams.
-- Aeschylus

#Dream #Men #Literature

Death is easier than a wretched life; and better never to have born than to live and fare badly.
-- Aeschylus

#Literature #Easier #Born

The evils of mortals are manifold; nowhere is trouble of the same wing seen.
-- Aeschylus

#Wings #Evil #Literature

Whoever is new to power is always harsh.
-- Aeschylus

#Power #Literature #Harsh

For children preserve the fame of a man after his death.
-- Aeschylus

#Children #Men #Literature

I willingly speak to those who know, but for those who do not know I forget.
-- Aeschylus

#Literature #Speak #Forget

For a murderous blow let murderous blow atone.
-- Aeschylus

#Blow #Literature

Please all, and you will please none.
-- Aesop

#Business #Literature #Decision Making

A liar will not be believed, even when he speaks the truth.
-- Aesop

#Liars #Lying #Literature

Do not count your chickens before they are hatched.
-- Aesop

#Wisdom #Literature #Chickens

Persuasion is often more effectual than force.
-- Aesop

#Hypnosis #Literature #Persuasion

But surely for everything you have to love you have to pay some price.
-- Agatha Christie

#Love You #Literature #Pay

Very few of us are what we seem.
-- Agatha Christie

#Literature

If one sticks too rigidly to one's principles, one would hardly see anybody.
-- Agatha Christie

#Principles #Literature #Sticks

Everything that has existed, lingers in the Eternity.
-- Agatha Christie

#Literature #Eternity

These little grey cells. It is up to them.
-- Agatha Christie

#Cells #Literature #Littles

Never do anything yourself that others can do for you.
-- Agatha Christie

#Memorable #Literature

I specialize in murders of quiet, domestic interest.
-- Agatha Christie

#Literature #Quiet #Murder

There is something frightful in being required to enjoy and appreciate all masterpieces; to read with equal relish Milton, and Dante, and Calderon, and Goethe, and Homer, and Scott, and Voltaire, and Wordsworth, and Cervantes, and Molière, and Swift.
-- Agnes Repplier

#Appreciate #Literature #Discrimination

Letters form a by-path of literature, a charming, but occasional, retreat for people of cultivated leisure.
-- Agnes Repplier

#People #Literature #Letters

You become a reader by reading the literature, not by reading the handbooks about it.
-- Aidan Chambers

#Reading #Literature #Reader

The appeal of reading, she thought, lay in its indifference: there was something undeferring about literature. Books did not care who was reading them or whether one read them or not. All readers were equal, herself included. Literature, she thought, is a commonwealth; letters a republic.
-- Alan Bennett

#Book #Reading #Literature

Above literature?' said the Queen. 'Who is above literature? You might as well say one was above humanity.
-- Alan Bennett

#Queens #Humanity #Literature

And Marx spoke of the fact that socialism will be the kingdom of freedom, where man realizes himself in a way that humankind has never seen before. This was an inspiring body of literature to read.
-- Albert Maltz

#Inspiring #Men #Literature

Reality deals in specifics under the guise of generalities. Literature does the contrary...
-- Alberto Manguel

#Reality #Doe #Literature

When literature is discovered, a revelation occurs: the joyful, exultant knowledge that anything can happen.
-- Alberto Manguel

#Literature #Joyful #Revelations

The worst enemy of life, freedom and the common decencies is total anarchy; their second worst enemy is total efficiency.
-- Aldous Huxley

#Enemy #Literature #Anarchy

Every man's memory is his private literature.
-- Aldous Huxley

#Memories #Men #Literature

Happiness is a hard master, particularly other people's happiness.
-- Aldous Huxley

#Happiness #People #Literature

Writers write to influence their readers, their preachers, their auditors, but always, at bottom, to be more themselves.
-- Aldous Huxley

#Writing #Individuality #Literature

Proverbs are always platitudes until you have personally experienced the truth of them.
-- Aldous Huxley

#Truth #Literature #Platitudes

Habit converts luxurious enjoyments into dull and daily necessities.
-- Aldous Huxley

#Luxury #Literature #Dull

My fate cannot be mastered; it can only be collaborated with and thereby, to some extent, directed. Nor am I the captain of my soul; I am only its noisiest passenger.
-- Aldous Huxley

#Fate #Soul #Literature

Perhaps it's good for one to suffer. Can an artist do anything if he's happy? Would he ever want to do anything? What is art, after all, but a protest against the horrible inclemency of life?
-- Aldous Huxley

#Art #Suffering #Literature

The essay is a literary device for saying almost everything about almost anything
-- Aldous Huxley

#Literature #Literary Devices #Devices

In Bosnian, there's no distinction in literature between fiction and nonfiction; there's no word describing that.
-- Aleksandar Hemon

#Fiction #Literature #Bosnians

Periods of rapid and fundamental change were never favourable for literature. Significant works, have nearly always and everywhere been created in periods of stability, be it good or bad.
-- Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

#Fundamentals #Literature #Significant

Literature transmits incontrovertible condensed experience... from generation to generation. In this way literature becomes the living memory of a nation.
-- Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

#Memories #Generations #Literature

The sole substitute for an experience which we have not ourselves lived through is art and literature.
-- Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

#Art #Literature #Substitutes

All nature is but art unknown to thee.
-- Alexander Pope

#Art #Nature #Literature

Praise undeserved, is satire in disguise.
-- Alexander Pope

#Literature #Praise #Satire

But Satan now is wiser than of yore, and tempts by making rich, not making poor.
-- Alexander Pope

#Temptation #Literature #Satan

A perfect judge will read each word of wit with the same spirit that its author writ.
-- Alexander Pope

#Perfect #Judging #Literature

Wit is the lowest form of humor.
-- Alexander Pope

#Humor #Literature #Form

Never find fault with the absent.
-- Alexander Pope

#Literature #Faults #Absent

The ruling passion, be it what it will. The ruling passion conquers reason still.
-- Alexander Pope

#Passion #Literature #Conquer

Style, after all, rather than thought, is the immortal thing in literature.
-- Alexander Smith

#Style #Literature #Immortal

Puns are the highest form of literature.
-- Alfred Hitchcock

#Funny #Literature #Form

Is it strange, then, that in a literature so concerned with realism and with personal liberation this refusal and impoverishment of the life of the spirit have always nourished the screamers, the eccentrics, the pseudo-Whitmans, the calculating terrorists?
-- Alfred Kazin

#Literature #Pseudo #Spirit

The misconception which has haunted philosophic literature throughout the centuries is the notion of 'independent existence.' There is no such mode of existence; every entity is to be understood in terms of the way it is interwoven with the rest of the universe.
-- Alfred North Whitehead

#Independent #Literature #Way

The total absence of humor from the Bible is one of the most singular things in all literature.
-- Alfred North Whitehead

#Literature #Absence

I did literature at university, so I had a real relationship with poetry, but they don't make many films about the world of a poet.
-- Alice Eve

#Real #Literature #World

Much contemporary verse reads like failed short-short stories rather than failed poetry.
-- Alice Fulton

#Poetry #Stories #Literature

People do not wish to appear foolish; to avoid the appearance of foolishness, they are willing to remain actually fools.
-- Alice Walker

#People #Wish #Literature

All History is current; all injustice continues on some level, somewhere in the world.
-- Alice Walker

#Literature #World #Levels

Womanist is to feminist as purple is to lavender.
-- Alice Walker

#Purple #Feminist #Literature

Tea to the English is really a picnic indoors.
-- Alice Walker

#Tea #Picnics #Literature

Never be the only one, except, possibly, in your own home.
-- Alice Walker

#Home #Literature

Anybody can observe the Sabbath, but making it holy surely takes the rest of the week.
-- Alice Walker

#Self Esteem #Literature #Week

Real literature, like travel, is always a surprise.
-- Alison Lurie

#Real #Literature #Surprise

All literature up to today is sexist. The Muses never sang to the poets about liberated women. It's the same old chanson from the Bible and Homer through Joyce and Proust.
-- Allan Bloom

#Men #Today #Literature

America, I've given you all and now I'm nothing.
-- Allen Ginsberg

#America #Literature #Given

The weight of the world is love. Under the burden of solitude, under the burden of dissatisfaction.
-- Allen Ginsberg

#Solitude #Literature #World

Whoever controls the media, the images, controls the culture.
-- Allen Ginsberg

#Media #Culture #Literature

Democracy! Bah! When I hear that I reach for my feather boa!
-- Allen Ginsberg

#Political #Democracy #Literature

Acquiring a repertoire in these days, when the vocal literature is so immense, so overwhelming, that the student with sense will devote all his energies to work and not imagine himself a martyr to art.
-- Alma Gluck

#Art #Energy #Literature

Music is the literature of the heart; it commences where speech ends.
-- Alphonse de Lamartine

#Music #Heart #Literature

Newspapers will ultimately engross all literature.
-- Alphonse de Lamartine

#Literature #Newspapers

Sabbath - a weekly festival having its origin in the fact that God made the world in six days and was arrested on the seventh.
-- Ambrose Bierce

#Literature #World #Festivals

Prescription: A physician's guess at what will best prolong the situation with least harm to the patient.
-- Ambrose Bierce

#Physicians #Literature #Patient

Dog - a kind of additional or subsidiary Deity designed to catch the overflow and surplus of the world's worship.
-- Ambrose Bierce

#Dog #Literature #World

Impartial - unable to perceive any promise of personal advantage from espousing either side of a controversy.
-- Ambrose Bierce

#Promise #Literature #Sides

NOVEL, n. A short story padded...
-- Ambrose Bierce

#Stories #Literature #Novel

Literature makes history come to life. It is maybe the most accurate depiction of history, especially literature that was written in the time period depicted in the story.
-- Amy Harmon

#Stories #Literature #Periods

Poetry is the most concentrated form of literature; it is the most emotionalized and powerful way in which thought can be presented ...
-- Amy Lowell

#Powerful #Poetry #Literature

Poets are always the advance guard of literature; the advance guard of life. It is for this reason that their recognition comes so slowly.
-- Amy Lowell

#Literature #Recognition #Poet

It is one of the paradoxes of American literature that our writers are forever looking back with love and nostalgia at lives they couldn't wait to leave.
-- Anatole Broyard

#Waiting #Forever #Literature

I thank fate for having made me born poor. Poverty taught me the true value of the gifts useful to life.
-- Anatole France

#Fate #Literature #Poverty

It is human nature to think wisely and act in an absurd fashion.
-- Anatole France

#Fashion #Thinking #Literature

The truth is that life is delicious, horrible, charming, frightful, sweet, bitter, and that is everything.
-- Anatole France

#Life #Sweet #Literature

Innocence most often is a good fortune and not a virtue.
-- Anatole France

#Literature #Innocence #Virtue

The thing I love about reporting is being able to blend in with any group, whether that's neo-Nazis or pedophiles.
-- Anderson Cooper

#Groups #Literature #Able

Keep reminding yourself that literature is one of the saddest roads that leads to everything.
-- Andre Breton

#Literature #Reminding Yourself

What would there be in a story of happiness? Only what prepares it, only what destroys it can be told.
-- Andre Gide

#Writing #Stories #Literature

It is with noble sentiments that bad literature gets written.
-- Andre Gide

#Writing #Noble #Literature

It is good to follow one's own bent, so long as it leads upward.
-- Andre Gide

#Long #Literature #Bent

Often with good sentiments we produce bad literature.
-- Andre Gide

#Writing #Literature #Produce

No theory is good unless it permits, not rest, but the greatest work. No theory is good except on condition that one use it to go on beyond.
-- Andre Gide

#Use #Goes On #Literature

In literature as in love, we are astonished at what is chosen by others.
-- Andre Maurois

#Love #Literature #Chosen