Best 5099 quotes in «literature quotes» category

An engaged woman is always more agreeable than a disengaged. She is satisfied with herself. Her cares are over, and she feels that she may exert all her powers of pleasing without suspicion. All is safe with a lady engaged; no harm can be done.

An Englishman's never so natural as when he's holding his tongue.

An Englishman will fairly drink as much As will maintain two families of Dutch.

A New York divorce is in itself a diploma of virtue.

An hour's conversation on literature between two ardent minds with a common devotion to a neglected poet is a miraculous road to intimacy.

An optimist is a fellow who believes a housefly is looking for a way to get out.

An organization is a set of relationships that are persistent over time.

An optimist is a fellow who believes what's going to be will be postponed

An organization's reason for being, like that of any organism, is to help the parts that are in relationship to each other, to be able to deal with change in the environment.

An unclean person is universally a slothful one.

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

Anybody, providing he knows how to be amusing, has the right to talk about himself.

Anybody who writes doesn't like to be misunderstood.

Any garment which is cut to fit you is much more becoming, even if it is not so splendid as a garment which has been cut to fit somebody not of your stature.

Any general statement is like a check drawn on a bank. Its value depends on what is there to meet it.

Any literature, when it arrives at being good literature, transcends genre.

Anyone who reads advice books about romance has one problem to begin with: bad taste in literature.

Anyone who wants to be a writer should, if given the opportunity, hang out with "real writers," that is, poets or writers who are lions in literature, semi-lions, or published authors.

Any philosophical and theoretical assurance that laughter is unique to the human being becomes somewhat unsure when one turns to the anthropological literature.

Anything outside marriage seems like freedom and excitement.

Any task can be completed in only one-third more time than is currently estimated.

Any writer, I suppose, feels that the world into which he was born is nothing less than a conspiracy against the cultivation of his talent.

Any writer worth his salt knows that only a small proportion of literature does nore than partly compensate people for the damage they have suffered in learning to read.

Any work of art that can be understood is the product of journalism. The rest, called literature, is a dossier of human imbecility for the guidance of future professors.

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

A person dishonored is worst than dead.

Aphorisms are the true form of the universal philosophy.

A person places themselves on a level with the ones they praise.

A person who can't pay gets another person who can't pay to guarantee that he can pay. Like a person with two wooden legs getting another person with two wooden legs to guarantee that he has got two natural legs. It don't make either of them able to do a walking-match.

A poem (surely someone has said this before) is a one-night stand, a short story a love affair, and a novel a marriage.

A poet is the most unpoetical of anything in existence; because he has no identity he is continually informing and filling some other body.

A portion of mankind take pride in their vices and pursue their purpose; many more waver between doing what is right and complying with what is wrong.

A politician's goal is always to manipulate public debate. I think there are some politicians with higher goals. But all of them get corrupted by power.

A popular feel for scientific endeavors should, if possible, be restored given the needs of the twenty-first century. This does not mean that every literature major should take a watered-down physics course or that a corporate lawyer should stay abreast of quantum mechanics. Rather, it means that an appreciation for the methods of science is a useful asset for a responsible citizenry. What science teaches us, very significantly, is the correlation between factual evidence and general theories, something well illustrated in Einstein's life.

Appearances are often deceiving.

A President is best judged by the enemies he makes when he has really hit his stride.

A private sin is not so prejudicial in this world, as a public indecency.

A Pulitzer Prize is awaiting the journalist who can find an American who dies of hunger, and probably the Nobel Prize for literature as well.

Arabs don't do crime fiction. I read crime fiction and I read Arabic literature, and I wish this was a novel I could have read in Arabic.

A proof of really great art is that it is generally true - it seldom falls into the misapprehensions to which minor art is liable.

A recurring theme in the literature of secular humanism is the harsh assault upon traditional religion, especially Christianity.

Are not laws dangerous which inhibit the passions? Compare the centuries of anarchy with those of the strongest legalism in any country you like and you will see that it is only when the laws are silent that the greatest actions appear.

A reporter's ability to keep the bond of confidentiality often enables him to learn the hidden or secret aspects of government.

A revised schedule is to business what a new season is to an athlete or a new canvas to an artist.

Art and literature need extreme sociality to a degree that even dolphins don't have. We are the only large mammalian species that has such intense sociality. There are some small mammals that have become eusocial - the mole rats - but that's a different thing. Humans are able to understand one another at very high levels, to cooperate in very large groups. Humans depend on one another in ways that are an absolute precondition to sharing the kinds of information that makes narrative possible.

Art has always been this--pure interrogation, rhetorical question less the rhetoric--whatever else it may have been obliged by social reality to appear.

Art is the daughter of freedom.

Art - I had never thought of that as a career because it was like something I did so naturally, and it was fluid, and it is. And even though I still admire literature as the superior art form, I have to admit that art, for me, that's it; that's what I'm good at, and that's what I should be concentrating on.

Art requires neither complaisance nor politeness; nothing but faith, faith and freedom.

Artistic simplicity is more complex than artistic complexity for it arises via the simplification of the latter and against its backdrop or system.