Literature Quotes

Even in literature and art, no man who bothers about originality will ever be original: whereas if you simply try to tell the truth (without caring twopence how often it has been told before) you will, nine times out of ten, become original without ever having noticed it.
C. S. Lewis

Truth, Art, Before

Literature adds to reality, it does not simply describe it. It enriches the necessary competencies that daily life requires and provides; and in this respect, it irrigates the deserts that our lives have already become.
C. S. Lewis

Life, Respect, Daily

Literature is my Utopia. Here I am not disenfranchised. No barrier of the senses shuts me out from the sweet, gracious discourses of my book friends. They talk to me without embarrassment or awkwardness.
Helen Keller

Book, Friends, Talk

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

Between, Read, Difference

Develop an interest in life as you see it; the people, things, literature, music - the world is so rich, simply throbbing with rich treasures, beautiful souls and interesting people. Forget yourself.
Henry Miller

Life, Music, Beautiful

The reason that fiction is more interesting than any other form of literature, to those who really like to study people, is that in fiction the author can really tell the truth without humiliating himself.
Jim Rohn

Truth, Study, Reason

All modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn.
Ernest Hemingway

Book, American, Modern

The greatest advances of civilization, whether in architecture or painting, in science and literature, in industry or agriculture, have never come from centralized government.
Milton Friedman

Government, Science, Greatest

Develop interest in life as you see it; in people, things, literature, music - the world is so rich, simply throbbing with rich treasures, beautiful souls and interesting people. Forget yourself.
Henry Miller

Life, Music, Beautiful

The decline of literature indicates the decline of a nation.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Nation, Decline, Indicates

The difficulty of literature is not to write, but to write what you mean; not to affect your reader, but to affect him precisely as you wish.
Robert Louis Stevenson

Mean, Him, Wish

Medicine is my lawful wife and literature my mistress; when I get tired of one, I spend the night with the other.
Anton Chekhov

Tired, Wife, Night

The web, then, or the pattern, a web at once sensuous and logical, an elegant and pregnant texture: that is style, that is the foundation of the art of literature.
Robert Louis Stevenson

Art, Once, Style

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

Memory, Private

It has become almost a cliche to remark that nobody boasts of ignorance of literature, but it is socially acceptable to boast ignorance of science and proudly claim incompetence in mathematics.
Richard Dawkins

Science, Ignorance, Become

I lead no party; I follow no leader. I have given the best part of my life to careful study of Islam, its law and polity, its culture, its history and its literature.
Muhammad Iqbal

Life, Best, History

We know too much, and are convinced of too little. Our literature is a substitute for religion, and so is our religion.
T. S. Eliot

Religion, Convinced, Substitute

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.
George Orwell

Above, Novel, Atmosphere

There is a great discovery still to be made in literature, that of paying literary men by the quantity they do not write.
Thomas Carlyle

Great, Men, Made

Our high respect for a well read person is praise enough for literature.
T. S. Eliot

Respect, Person, Enough

I am an Anglo-Catholic in religion, a classicist in literature and a royalist in politics.
T. S. Eliot

Religion, Politics

I tell my students, it's not difficult to identify with somebody like yourself, somebody next door who looks like you. What's more difficult is to identify with someone you don't see, who's very far away, who's a different color, who eats a different kind of food. When you begin to do that then literature is really performing its wonders.
Chinua Achebe

Food, Yourself, Someone

The Bible should be taught, but emphatically not as reality. It is fiction, myth, poetry, anything but reality. As such it needs to be taught because it underlies so much of our literature and our culture.
Richard Dawkins

Poetry, Reality, Culture

Every man's work, whether it be literature, or music or pictures or architecture or anything else, is always a portrait of himself.
Samuel Butler

Music, Work, Else

Literature is a luxury; fiction is a necessity.
Gilbert K. Chesterton

Fiction, Necessity, Luxury

What is wonderful about great literature is that it transforms the man who reads it towards the condition of the man who wrote.
E. M. Forster

Great, Wonderful, Condition

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

Someone, Single, Everything

The sinews of art and literature, like those of war, are money.
Samuel Butler

Money, War, Art

Bad literature is a form of treason.
Joseph Brodsky

It is the nature of the artist to mind excessively what is said about him. Literature is strewn with the wreckage of men who have minded beyond reason the opinions of others.
Virginia Woolf

Nature, Men, Mind

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