Best 5099 quotes in «literature quotes» category

Of all follies there is none greater than wanting to make the world a better place.

Of all the many and (thanks to a free press) the ever-multiplying blessings attendant upon the "glorious constitution" of literature, not the least precious and profitable to a modern cultivator of systems and syllables, in pamphlets, magazines, and folios, is the right of Quotation.

Of all ghosts the ghosts of our old loves are the worst.

Of all the cants which are canted in this canting world - though the cant of hypocrites may be the worst - the cant of criticism is the most tormenting!

Of course great politicians are always liable to be wrong about something, and the more people tell them they are wrong, the more stubbornly they defend their error.

Of all the senses, sight must be the most delightful.

Of all the sexual aberrations, chastity is the strangest.

Of all the ways of defining man, the worst is the one which makes him out to be a rational animal.

Of course, at their best, movies are anti-literature and, as a medium, belong not to writers, not to actors, but to directors.

Office politics are bloody-minded, but weak on content.

Often I look back and see that I had been many kinds of a fool-and that I had been happy in being this or that kind of fool.

Often with good sentiments we produce bad literature.

Of the individual poems, some are more lyric and some are more descriptive or narrative. Each poem is fixed in a moment. All those moments written or read together take on the movement and architecture of a narrative.

Oh! do not attack me with your watch. A watch is always too fast or too slow. I cannot be dictated to by a watch.

Oh, how fine it is to know a thing or two.

Oh, I wish I were a miser; being a miser must be so occupying.

Oh, love will make a dog howl in rhyme.

Oldboy makes us feel a part of something bigger than ourselves. It's a grand, gritty, indelible experience, the sort of picture that mimics great literature in the way it envelops you in a well-told story while also evoking subtle but strong gradations of emotion.

On 16 September 1985, when the Commerce Department announced that the United States had become a debtor nation, the American Empire died.

On almost anything someone does in the computer business, you can go back in the literature and prove someone had done it earlier.

On a daily basis there are some huge ones that are, sure, from time to time, but it is helping the reader sort through all this sort of gray stuff out there.

Once it was suggested that Saddam Hussein might give his weaponry to terrorists, or might use weapons himself in the region, then it became hard for the Democrats to say, 'Well, that can't happen.'

Once in awhile you have a thought, and you rhyme it.

Once more it was borne in on him that marriage was not the safe anchorage he had been taught to think, but a voyage on uncharted seas.

Once the herd starts moving in one direction, it's very hard to turn it, even slightly.

Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered weak and weary.

Once you get into the era of the printed book, it gets a little easier. After years and years, you make a serious survey of that literature, and then you make it more specific depending on what kind of case appears. I never set out to collect material on cheating at bowling, but I found out that after 20 years, I had a lot of material on cheating at bowling.

Once you get a spice in your home, you have it forever. Women never throw out spices. The Egyptians were buried with their spices. I know which one I'm taking with me when I go.

[On collectors of quotations:] How far our literature may in future suffer from these blighting swarms, will best be conceived by a glance at what they have already withered and blasted of the favourite productions of our most popular poets.

One can live in the shadow of an idea without grasping it.

One cannot legislate problems out of existence. It has been tried.

One can find so many pains when the rain is falling.

One arrives at style only with atrocious effort, with fanatical and devoted stubbornness.

One characteristic of winners is they always look upon themselves as a do it yourself project.

One effect that the Nobel Prize seems to have had is that more Arabic literary works have been translated into other languages.

One doesn't recognize the really important moments in one's life until it's too late.

One forgets words as one forgets names. One's vocabulary needs constant fertilizing or it will die.

One is and is not in the centre of the maelstrom of it all.

One is not quite certain that creativeness in the arts, literature, and science functions best in an environment of absolute freedom. Chances are that a relatively mild tyranny stimulates creativeness.

One man's ways may be as good as another's, but we all like our own best.

One must not hope to be more than one can be.

One may summon his philosophy when they are beaten in battle, not till then.

One of my great passions is the collection of historical trivia.

One of my greatest pleasures is falling into a story someone else has written.

One of my major preoccupations is the approximation between what I say and what I do, between what I seem to be and what I am actually becoming.

One never knows whether people have principles on principle or whether for their own personal satisfaction.

One never tires of what is well written, style is life! It is the very blood of thought!

One of my rules is never explain. A writer is a lot like a magician, if you explain how the trick works then a lot of the magic turns mundane.

One of the biggest problems in literature is the lack of subtlety.

One of the functions of literary criticism, or reviewing, generally - and I, most of my reviews actually are not about literature - but one of the functions of that is basically the sort of Consumer Reports function of letting readers know whether this is something they want to read.