Best 5099 quotes in «literature quotes» category

To have his path made clear for him is the aspiration of every human being in our beclouded and tempestuous existence.

To kill a human being is, after all, the least injury you can do him.

To know that the Bible is the literature of a barbarous people, to know that it is uninspired, to be certain that the supernatural does not and cannot exist - all this is but the beginning of wisdom.

To make a prairie it takes a clover and one bee, One clover, and a bee, And revery. The revery alone will do, If bees are few.

To me all men are equal: there are jackasses everywhere, and I have the same contempt for them all.

To many writers and thinkers, though not to all, another text is, or can be, the most naked and charged of life-forces ... The concept of allusion or analogue is totally inadequate. To Dante these other texts are the organic context of identity. They are as directly about life as life is about them.

To me history ought to be a source of pleasure. It isn't just part of our civic responsibility. To me it's an enlargement of the experience of being alive, just the way literature or art or music is.

Tomorrow is a satire on today, And shows its weakness.

To me, this is the singular privilege of reading literature: we are allowed to step into another's life.

Too low they build who build below the skies.

Too few rejoice at a friend's good fortune.

Too many people say to their brokers, I can't deal with this. Take my money. Do what you want. That's the worst attitude you can have.

To pin your hopes upon the future is to consign those hopes to a hypothesis, which is to say, a nothingness. Here and now is what we must contend with.

To provoke dreams of terror in the slumber of prosperity has become the moral duty of literature.

To produce a mighty book, you must choose a mighty theme. No great and enduring volume can ever be written on the flea, though many there be that have tried it.

To put it in a nutshell, he was afflicted with a love of literature. It was the fatal nature of this disease to substitute a phantom for reality.

To really ask is to open the door to the whirlwind. The answer may annihilate the question and the questioner.

To realize that new world we must prefer the values of freedom and equality above all other values - above personal wealth, technical power and nationalism.

To rehearse imaginary conversations on paper is called literature. To do so out loud is called madness.

To shut yourself from history is to shut yourself off from say music or painting or the theatre, literature for the rest of your life.  It would be to cheat yourself of the pleasures of life.

To study history is to study literature.

To survive it is often necessary to fight and to fight you have to dirty yourself.

Totem poles and wooden masks no longer suggest tribal villages but fashionable drawing rooms in New York and Paris.

To the person with a firm purpose all men and things are servants.

Touch us gently, Time! Let us glide adown thy stream Gently,-as we sometimes glide Through a quiet dream!

To throw oneself to the side of the oppressed is the only dignified thing to do in life.

To whom it may concern: It is springtime. It is late afternoon.

To witness two lovers is a spectacle for the gods.

To withdraw myself from myself has ever been my sole, my entire, my sincere motive in scribbling at all.

To write something, you have to risk making a fool of yourself.

Translation is the circulatory system of the world's literatures

Trouble has no necessary connection with discouragement. Discouragement has a germ of its own, as different from trouble as arthritis is different from a stiff joint.

True terror is a language and a vision. There is a deep narrative structure to terrorist acts, and they infiltrate and alter consciousness in ways that writers used to aspire to.

True eloquence consists in saying all that is necessary, and nothing but what is necessary.

True friends appear less moved than counterfeit.

True politeness consists in being easy one's self, and in making every one about one as easy as one can.

True originality consists not in a new manner but in a new vision.

True, Heaven prohibits certain pleasures; but one can generally negotiate a compromise.

True memoir is written, like all literature, in an attempt to find not only a self but a world

Trust funds can never be a substitute for a fund of trust.

Truth is not always injured by fiction.

Truth of a modest sort I can promise you, and also sincerity. That complete, praiseworthy sincerity which, while it delivers one into the hands of one's enemies, is as likely as not to embroil one with one's friends.

Truths and roses have thorns about them.

Truth should not be forced; it should simply manifest itself, like a woman who has in her privacy reflected and coolly decided to bestow herself upon a certain man.

Truth uncompromisingly told will always have its ragged edges.

Truth is always a delusion.

Truth never was indebted to a lie

Twentieth-century American poetry has been one of the glories of modern literature.

Truth is something which can't be told in a few words. Those who simplify the universe only reduce the expansion of its meaning.

Truth is the most valuable thing we have. Let us economize it.