Best 5099 quotes in «literature quotes» category

To admit authorities, however heavily furred and gowned, into our libraries and let them tell us how to read, what to read, what value to place upon what we read, is to destroy the spirit of freedom which is the breath of those sanctuaries. Everywhere else we may be bound by laws and conventions—there we have none.

To become a 'good reader' one must give oneself over to a regime of concentrated pleasure. One does not set out to read a book a day (there is no necessary pleasure in that) but may spend two or three years on one book [. . .], read only portions of another, devour a third at a single sitting.

To be happy to be sad and sad to be happy is to sing an echo in that beautiful language called Sorrow.

To cut and tighten sentences is the secret of mastery.

Today is the beginning of new history.

To delight in literature is to desire to learn.

Todo éxito es una apología de lo vulgar. Cualquier libro que rebasa los cien ejemplares es un fracaso para el buen gusto. ¿O qué habría de pensarse de un mismo libro leído simultáneamente por cien mil personas? ¿Se diría que lo que se está leyendo es literatura?, ¿qué tan complaciente habrá de ser ese libro para satisfacer a tantos lectores? ¿O es que la inteligencia está tan democráticamente repartida?

To expect to be kissed having bad breath is the secret of a fool.

To feel most beautifully alive means to be reading something beautiful, ready always to apprehend in the flow of language the sudden flash of poetry.

To go where no one else has ever gone before is the secret of heroism.

To hell with irony and wit! I read to be moved.

To me without Dostoievsky's work there would be a deep, black hole in world literature. The loss of Shakespeare, who must seem like a wild man to the Chinese, would not be as great as losing Dostoievsky.

To make someone an icon is to make him an abstraction, and abstractions are incapable of vital communication with living people.10 10 One has only to spend a term trying to teach college literature to realize that the quickest way to kill an author's vitality for potential readers is to present that author ahead of his time as "great" or "classic." Because then the author becomes for the students like medicine or vegetables, something the authorities have declared "good for them" that they "ought to like," at which point the students' nictitating membranes come down, and everyone just goes through the requisite motions of criticism and paper-writing without feeling one real or relevant thing. It's like removing all oxygen from the room before trying to start a fire.

To maintain your honesty , one must know to keep alive the spirit of chidhood

Tonight, however, Dickens struck him in a different light. Beneath the author’s sentimental pity for the weak and helpless, he could discern a revolting pleasure in cruelty and suffering, while the grotesque figures of the people in Cruikshank’s illustrations revealed too clearly the hideous distortions of their souls. What had seemed humorous now appeared diabolic, and in disgust at these two favourites he turned to Walter Pater for the repose and dignity of a classic spirit. But presently he wondered if this spirit were not in itself of a marble quality, frigid and lifeless, contrary to the purpose of nature. ‘I have often thought’, he said to himself, ‘that there is something evil in the austere worship of beauty for its own sake.’ He had never thought so before, but he liked to think that this impulse of fancy was the result of mature consideration, and with this satisfaction he composed himself for sleep. He woke two or three times in the night, an unusual occurrence, but he was glad of it, for each time he had been dreaming horribly of these blameless Victorian works… It turned out to be the Boy’s Gulliver’s Travels that Granny had given him, and Dicky had at last to explain his rage with the devil who wrote it to show that men were worse than beasts and the human race a washout. A boy who never had good school reports had no right to be so morbidly sensitive as to penetrate to the underlying cynicism of Swift’s delightful fable, and that moreover in the bright and carefully expurgated edition they bring out nowadays. Mr Corbett could not say he had ever noticed the cynicism himself, though he knew from the critical books it must be there, and with some annoyance he advised his son to take out a nice bright modern boy’s adventure story that could not depress anybody. Mr Corbett soon found that he too was ‘off reading’. Every new book seemed to him weak, tasteless and insipid; while his old and familiar books were depressing or even, in some obscure way, disgusting. Authors must all be filthy-minded; they probably wrote what they dared not express in their lives. Stevenson had said that literature was a morbid secretion; he read Stevenson again to discover his peculiar morbidity, and detected in his essays a self-pity masquerading as courage, and in Treasure Island an invalid’s sickly attraction to brutality. This gave him a zest to find out what he disliked so much, and his taste for reading revived as he explored with relish the hidden infirmities of minds that had been valued by fools as great and noble. He saw Jane Austen and Charlotte Brontë as two unpleasant examples of spinsterhood; the one as a prying, sub-acid busybody in everyone else’s flirtations, the other as a raving, craving maenad seeking self-immolation on the altar of her frustrated passions. He compared Wordsworth’s love of nature to the monstrous egoism of an ancient bellwether, isolated from the flock.

To read well, that is, to read true books in a true spirit, is a noble exercise, and one that will task the reader more than any exercise which the customs of the day esteem. It requires a training such as the athletes underwent, the steady intention almost of the whole life to this object. Books must be read as deliberately and reservedly as they were written. It is not enough even to be able to speak the language of that nation by which they are written, for there is a memorable interval between the spoken and the written language, the language heard and the language read.

To jump over centuries In one step is impossible. Jump too high or far, You’ll be way too late.

To not say all that can be said is the secret of discipline and economy.

To read Shakespeare is to feel encompassed -- the plays contain practically every word I know, practically every character type I have ever met, and practically every idea I have ever had.

Total knowledge is annihilation Of the desire to see, to touch, to feel The world sensed only through senses And immune to the knowledge without feeling.

To the knights of faith nobody believes.

To write good poems is the secret of brevity.

Treat your mind like a museum, not a warehouse

To transform a grimace into a sound sounds impossible, yet it is possible to transform a vision into music, to go outside an enslaved personality, to become impersonal by transforming into sand, into water, into light.

To treat fiction as if it were a religious or moral sermon is about as far from the actuality of literature as it is possible to get and indeed it is, in my opinion, the purest form of intellectual barbarism.

To understand possible means to understand impossible.

...to use the little kick of energy which opposition supplies to be more vigorously oneself.

To write is to forget. Literature is the most agreeable way of ignoring life. Music soothes, the visual arts exhilarates, the performing arts (such as acting and dance) entertain. Literature, however, retreats from life by turning in into slumber. The other arts make no such retreat— some because they use visible and hence vital formulas, others because they live from human life itself. This isn't the case with literature. Literature simulates life. A novel is a story of what never was, a play is a novel without narration. A poem is the expression of ideas or feelings a language no one uses, because no one talks in verse.

True love finds its own ways To spread goodness, always.

Tutto questo” pensava “non dovrebbe poter durare; però durerà, sempre; il sempre umano, beninteso, un secolo, due secoli...; e dopo sarà diverso, ma peggiore. Noi fummo i Gattopardi, i Leoni; quelli che ci sostituiranno saranno gli sciacalletti, le iene; e tutti quanti Gattopardi, sciacalli e pecore, continueremo a crederci il sale della terra”.

Truth is hard-hearted and unrelenting, too clear, precise; a lie is much more imaginative.

Truth that is naked is the most beautiful.

Trying to live up to yourself is the most trying thing.

Tutto questo mentre stavano imparando l'unica lezione della vita: che nella vita di un individuo accadono più incidenti di quanto un uomo possa ammettere, se non vuole correre il rischio di impazzire.

Turn those deep feelings and obsessions of your heart into captivating pieces of literature.

Unborn eternity does not die; existence is dying and falls asleep in the eternity beyond existence.

Une œuvre où il y a des théories est comme un objet sur lequel on laisse la marque du prix.

Unjustified ambition kills value, Kills someone else's desire to fly, Cuts their wings, sucks their air. If there is nothing else, it eats its own life.

Until modern times, we focused a great deal of the best of our thought upon rituals of return to the human condition. Seeking enlightenment or the Promised Land or the way home, a man would go or be forced to go into the wilderness, measure himself against the Creation, recognize finally his true place within it, and thus be saved both from pride and from despair. Seeing himself as a tiny member of a world he cannot comprehend or master or in any final sense possess, he cannot possibly think of himself as a god. And by the same token, since he shares in, depends upon, and is graced by all of which he is a part, neither can he become a fiend; he cannot descend into the final despair of destructiveness. Returning from the wilderness, he becomes a restorer of order, a preserver. He sees the truth, recognizes his true heir, honors his forebears and his heritage, and gives his blessing to his successors. He embodies the passing of human time, living and dying within the human limits of grief and joy. (pg.95, "The Body and the Earth")

Utopia retains throughout its long history the basic form of the narrative of a journey... First comes the picture of a happy people in a beautiful and well-ordered setting; then comes the lecture on how it all came about, how it works, and, by implication, how it might be made to work in the traveller's own society.

Understand something people, we will be hated by many in the name of Christ, ridiculed, mocked, stoned, slaughtered. We will be fined, jailed and killed for our love for Christ. You are supposed to see better with your eyes today, how close this is happening, just prepare your heart and soul to be braver than Peter and not deny Christ in the moment your life might be in jeopardy for Him and what you believe. Apostle Pauls says to live is Christ to die is gain.

Universe is the Sun watching its own self.

Upon reading, great stories by Great Spirits, the glorious inspiration penetrated our soul; we can’t help but to shed tears. It was a soul soothing and a deep spiritual awaken.

Utopia retains throughout its long history the basic form of the narrative of a journey. The traveler in space or time is an explorer who happens upon utopia. He (or, more recently, she) meets its people, usually at first its ordinary people, observes them at work and play, sees their dwellings and their cities... The traveler is, as are we, the more prepared to accept the validity and desirability of the general principles for having seen with his own eyes its effects in the daily life of its inhabitants.

Va a sonar muy cliché o muy bobo, pero las cosas no suceden sólo porque sí, o tal vez sí lo hacen, y nosotros sólo le damos ese sentido al decir esa frase tonta que usamos para justificar lo que nos sucede, pero no sé. Tal vez ésa sí sea una de las pocas cosas que pasaron por algo y no sólo porque sí. Pero cuando unos hombres abrieron mi puerta y me jalaron mientras yo comenzaba a gritar, supe que nada podía mejorar y en ningún momento se me cruzó por la mente ese: Tal vez esto está pasando por algo.

Very early on, near the beginning of my writing life, I came to believe that I had to seize on some object outside of literature. Writing as a sylistic exercise seemed barren to me. Poetry as the art of the word made me yawn. I also understood that I couldn't sustain myself very long on the poems of others. I had to go out from myself and literature, look around in the world and lay hold of other spheres of reality.

Você descobre tudo que precisa saber sobre uma pessoa com a resposta desta pergunta: qual é o seu livro preferido?

Von allen Abenteuern ist Selbstmord das literarischste, mehr noch als Mord.

Vossignoria pertanto creda a me e, come le ho detto già prima, legga di questi libri e vedrà come le bandiscono la malinconia che caso mai avesse e le fanno migliore il carattere se mai l'abbia guasto. Per parte mia le so dire che da quando sono cavaliere errante sono valoroso, garbato, liberale, bennato, magnanimo, cortese, mite, paziente, tollerante di fatiche, di prigionie, d'incantagioni.

Watson is a cheap, efficient little sod of a literary device. Holmes doesn't need him to solve crimes any more than he needs a ten-stone ankle weight. The audience, Arthur. The audience needs Watson as an intermediary, so that Holmes's thoughts might be forever kept just out of reach. If you told stories from Holmes's perspective, everyone would know what the bleeding genius was thinking the whole time. They'd have the culprit fingered on page one.