• Every abridgement of a good book is a fool abridged.

  M

  Montaigne

  PhilosopherFrench1533 · 16th century

  3.5 · 52 votes · 71 reads

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• Every old poem is sacred.

  

  Horace

  PoetRoman-65 · 1st century BC

  4.7 · 38 votes · 127 reads

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• Every other author may aspire to praise; the lexicographer can only hope to escape reproach, and even this negative recompense has been yet granted to very few.

  

  Samuel Johnson

  AuthorBritish1709 · 18th century

  4.9 · 45 votes · 195 reads

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• For a novelist, a given historic situation is an anthropologic laboratory in which he explores his basic question: What is human existence?

  

  Milan Kundera

  WriterCzech1929 · 20th century

  3.6 · 7 votes · 161 reads

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• For books are not absolutely dead things, but do contain a potency of life in them to be as active as that soul was whose progeny they are; nay, they do preserve as in a vial the purest efficacy and extraction of that living intellect that bred them. I kn

  

  John Milton

  PoetEnglish1608 · 17th century

  4.4 · 45 votes · 165 reads

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• For what are the classics but the noblest thoughts of man? They are the only oracles which are not decayed, and there are such answers to the most modern inquiry in them as Delphi and Dodona never gave. We might as well omit to study Nature because she is

  

  Henry David Thoreau

  PoetAmerican1817 · 19th century

  5.0 · 38 votes · 145 reads

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• For whatever is truly wondrous and fearful in man, never yet was put into words or books.

  H

  Herman Melville

  WriterAmerican1819 · 19th century

  4.3 · 8 votes · 124 reads

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• Genuine polemics approach a book as lovingly as a cannibal spices a baby.

  

  Walter Bagehot

  EconomistBritish1826 · 19th century

  4.2 · 57 votes · 124 reads

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• Good poetry seems too simple and natural a thing that when we meet it we wonder that all men are not always poets. Poetry is nothing but healthy speech.

  

  Henry David Thoreau

  PoetAmerican1817 · 19th century

  3.5 · 14 votes · 198 reads

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• Great literature is simply language charged with meaning to the utmost possible degree.

  E

  Ezra Pound

  PoetAmerican1885 · 19th century

  4.0 · 22 votes · 5 reads

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• He ate and drank the precious Words, his Spirit grew robust; He knew no more that he was poor, nor that his frame was Dust.

  

  Emily Dickinson

  PoetAmerican1830 · 19th century

  3.6 · 22 votes · 132 reads

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• He has left off reading altogether, to the great improvement of his originality.

  

  Charles Lamb

  EssayistEnglish1775 · 18th century

  4.6 · 33 votes · 27 reads

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• Henry James seems most entirely in his element, doing that is to say what everything favors his doing, when it is a question of recollection. The mellow light which swims over the past, the beauty which suffuses even the commonest little figures of that

  

  Vincent van Gogh

  PainterDutch1853 · 19th century

  5.0 · 49 votes · 18 reads

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• Here undoubtedly lies the chief poetic energy: -in the force of imagination that pierces or exalts the solid fact, instead of floating among cloud-pictures.

  

  George Eliot

  WriterBritish1819 · 19th century

  4.8 · 14 votes · 42 reads

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• Homer has taught all other poets the art of telling lies skillfully.

  

  Aristotle

  PhilosopherGreek-384 · 4th century BC

  3.3 · 58 votes · 82 reads

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• How can you dare teach a man to read until you've taught him everything else first?

  

  George Bernard Shaw

  WriterIrish1856 · 19th century

  4.4 · 27 votes · 144 reads

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• How has the human spirit ever survived the terrific literature with which it has had to contend?

  

  W. Somerset Maugham

  WriterBritish1874 · 19th century

  4.0 · 51 votes · 69 reads

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• How long most people would look at the best book before they would give the price of a large turbot for it?

  

  John Ruskin

  WriterEnglish1819 · 19th century

  5.0 · 12 votes · 127 reads

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• How many a man has dated a new era in his life from the reading of a book! The book exists for us, perchance, that will explain our miracles and reveal new ones. The at present unutterable things we may find somewhere uttered.

  

  Henry David Thoreau

  PoetAmerican1817 · 19th century

  3.7 · 19 votes · 192 reads

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• How simple the writing of literature would be if it were only necessary to write in another way what has been well written. It is because we have had such great writers in the past that a Writeris driven far out past where he can go, out to where no one c

  

  Ernest Hemingway

  WriterAmerican1899 · 19th century

  3.7 · 25 votes · 150 reads

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• Hypocrite reader - my fellow - my brother!

  

  Charles Baudelaire

  PoetFrench1821 · 19th century

  4.3 · 48 votes · 154 reads

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• I am not a speed reader. I am a speed understander.

  

  Isaac Asimov

  ScientistAmerican1920 · 20th century

  3.7 · 19 votes · 102 reads

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• I by no means rank poetry high in the scale of intelligence -this may look like affectation but it is my real opinion. It is the lava of the imagination whose eruption prevents an earthquake.

  

  Lord Byron

  PoetBritish1788 · 18th century

  3.8 · 6 votes · 72 reads

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• I can't bear art that you can walk round and admire. A book should be either a bandit or a rebel or a man in the crowd.

  

  D. H. Lawrence

  WriterEnglish1885 · 19th century

  4.2 · 39 votes · 80 reads

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• I cannot accept the doctrine that in poetry there is a ''suspension of belief.'' A poet must never make a statement simply because it is sounds poetically exciting; he must also believe it to be true.

  W

  W. C. Fields

  ComedianAmerican1880 · 19th century

  4.4 · 18 votes · 183 reads

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• I cannot live without books.

  

  Thomas Hobbes

  PhilosopherBritish1588 · 16th century

  4.7 · 64 votes · 69 reads

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• I demand that my books be judged with utmost severity, by knowledgeable people who know the rules of grammar and of logic, and who will seek beneath the footsteps of my commas the lice of my thought in the head of my style.

  L

  Louis Aragon

  PoetFrench1897 · 19th century

  4.3 · 7 votes · 108 reads

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• I don't believe in personal immortality; the only way I expect to have some version of such a thing is through my books.

  

  Isaac Asimov

  ScientistAmerican1920 · 20th century

  3.8 · 37 votes · 93 reads

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• I feel a kind of reverence for the first books of young authors. There is so much aspiration in them, so much audacious hope and trembling fear, so much of the heart's history, that all errors and shortcomings are for a while lost sight of in the amiable

  

  Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

  PoetAmerican1807 · 19th century

  3.7 · 31 votes · 113 reads

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• I have written some poetry that I don't understand myself.

  C

  Carl Sandburg

  PoetAmerican1878 · 19th century

  4.1 · 48 votes · 57 reads

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• I love to lose myself in other men's minds. When I am not walking, I am reading. I cannot sit and think; books think for me.

  

  Charles Lamb

  EssayistEnglish1775 · 18th century

  4.2 · 41 votes · 48 reads

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• I loved literary science fiction. In fact, as a kid, when I was reading science fiction, I thought 'I can't wait for the future when the special effects are good' to represent what was in these books by Arthur C. Clarke, Alfred Bester, Philip K. Dick, J.G

  

  Matt Groening

  CartoonistAmerican1954 · 20th century

  4.2 · 60 votes · 194 reads

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• I take as metaphysical poetry that in which what is ordinarily apprehensible only by thought is brought within the grasp of feeling, or that in which what is ordinarily only felt is transformed into thought without ceasing to be feeling.

  

  Susan Sontag

  AuthorAmerican1933 · 20th century

  4.7 · 18 votes · 138 reads

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• I want my books sold on airport bookstalls.

  

  Stephen Hawking

  PhysicistEnglish1942 · 20th century

  4.8 · 62 votes · 144 reads

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• I wish I could write a beautiful book to break those hearts that are soon to cease to exist: a book of faith and small neat worlds and of people who live by the philosophies of popular songs.

  A

  Anonymous

  4.2 · 21 votes · 173 reads

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• I wish our clever young poets would remember my homely definitions of prose and poetry; that is, prose = words in their best order; -poetry = the best words in the best order.

  

  Samuel Taylor Coleridge

  PoetBritish1772 · 18th century

  4.1 · 34 votes · 14 reads

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• I would as soon write free verse as play tennis with the net down.

  

  Robert Burton

  EducatorEnglish1577 · 16th century

  3.3 · 39 votes · 102 reads

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• I would define the poetic effect as the capacity that a text displays for continuing to generate different readings, without ever being completely consumed.

  T

  Truman Capote

  AuthorAmerican1924 · 20th century

  3.9 · 62 votes · 151 reads

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• I would sooner read a timetable or a catalog than nothing at all.

  

  W. H. Auden

  PoetEnglish1907 · 20th century

  3.4 · 19 votes · 6 reads

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• I've been drunk for about a week now, and I thought it might sober me up to sit in a library.

  F

  F. Scott Fitzgerald

  WriterAmerican1896 · 19th century

  3.7 · 59 votes · 39 reads

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• If a book comes from the heart it will contrive to reach other hearts. All art and author craft are of small account to that.

  

  Thomas Carlyle

  WriterBritish1795 · 18th century

  4.4 · 22 votes · 105 reads

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• If a nation's literature declines, the nation atrophies and decays.

  E

  Ezra Pound

  PoetAmerican1885 · 19th century

  4.2 · 30 votes · 31 reads

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• If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry.

  

  Emily Dickinson

  PoetAmerican1830 · 19th century

  3.5 · 49 votes · 127 reads

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• If I have not read a book before, it is, for all intents and purposes, new to me whether it was printed yesterday or three hundred years ago.

  

  William Faulkner

  WriterAmerican1897 · 19th century

  3.5 · 56 votes · 44 reads

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• If literature isn't everything, it's not worth a single hour of someone's trouble.

  

  Jean Paul Sartre

  WriterFrench1905 · 20th century

  3.6 · 42 votes · 182 reads

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• If the most significant characteristic of man is the complex of biological needs he shares with all members of his species, then the best lives for the Writerto observe are those in which the role of natural necessity is clearest, namely, the lives of the

  W

  W. C. Fields

  ComedianAmerican1880 · 19th century

  4.0 · 12 votes · 163 reads

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• If we encounter a man of rare intellect, we should ask him what books he reads.

  

  Ralph Waldo Emerson

  PoetAmerican1803 · 19th century

  3.2 · 11 votes · 141 reads

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• If you look at history you'll find that no state has been so plagued by its rulers as when power has fallen into the hands of some dabbler in philosophy or literary addict.

  

  Erasmus of Rotterdam

  TheologianDutch1466 · 15th century

  3.4 · 55 votes · 124 reads

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• In any situation, ask yourself: What strengths do I possess that can contribute towards accomplishing something in this situation? Then follow through.

  A

  Anonymous

  3.8 · 51 votes · 70 reads

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• In literature the ambition of the novice is to acquire the literary language: the struggle of the adept is to get rid of it.

  

  George Bernard Shaw

  WriterIrish1856 · 19th century

  3.9 · 30 votes · 195 reads

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• In literature, as in love, we are astonished at the choice made by other people.

  

  André Maurois

  WriterFrench1885 · 19th century

  4.1 · 36 votes · 184 reads

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• In science one tries to tell people, in such a way as to be understood by everyone, something that no one ever knew before. But in poetry, it's the exact opposite.

  

  Franz Kafka

  WriterCzeck1883 · 19th century

  4.7 · 49 votes · 72 reads

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• In science read the newest works, in literature read the oldest.

  E

  Edward G. Bulwer-Lytton

  PoliticianBritish1803 · 19th century

  4.1 · 21 votes · 21 reads

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• Interpretation is the revenge of the intellect upon art. Even more. It is the revenge of the intellect upon the world. To interpret is to impoverish, to deplete the world - in order to set up a shadow world of ''meanings.''

  

  Stendhal

  NovelistFrench1783 · 18th century

  4.5 · 20 votes · 74 reads

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• It does not need that a poem should be long. Every word was once a poem. Every new relationship is a new word.

  

  Ralph Waldo Emerson

  PoetAmerican1803 · 19th century

  3.0 · 21 votes · 3 reads

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• It is a sad fact about our culture that a poet can earn much more money writing or talking about his art than he can by practicing it.

  W

  W. C. Fields

  ComedianAmerican1880 · 19th century

  3.8 · 9 votes · 0 reads

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• It is almost everywhere the case that soon after it is begotten the greater part of human wisdom is laid to rest in repositories.

  G

  Georg C. Lichtenberg

  ScientistGerman1742 · 18th century

  4.7 · 8 votes · 36 reads

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• It is as impossible to translate poetry as it is to translate music.

  

  Virginia Woolf

  WriterBritish1882 · 19th century

  3.8 · 58 votes · 174 reads

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• It is easier to write an indifferent poem than to understand a good one.

  M

  Montaigne

  PhilosopherFrench1533 · 16th century

  3.7 · 13 votes · 194 reads

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• It is far better to be silent than merely to increase the quantity of bad books.

  

  Virginia Woolf

  WriterBritish1882 · 19th century

  4.7 · 56 votes · 172 reads

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• It is from books that wise people derive consolation in the troubles of life.

  

  Umberto Eco

  NovelistItaly1932 · 20th century

  4.0 · 27 votes · 75 reads

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• It is the story-teller's task to elicit sympathy and a measure of understanding for those who lie outside the boundaries of State approval.

  

  Graham Greene

  WriterEnglish1904 · 20th century

  4.6 · 62 votes · 157 reads

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• It seems just possible that a poem might happen to a very young man: but a poem is not poetry -That is a life.

  

  Susan Sontag

  AuthorAmerican1933 · 20th century

  4.3 · 5 votes · 98 reads

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• It takes a great deal of history to produce a little literature.

  H

  Henry James

  AuthorAmerican-British1843 · 19th century

  3.5 · 50 votes · 98 reads

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• Leisure without literature is death and burial alive.

  

  Seneca

  PhilosopherRoman-4 · 1st century BC

  3.5 · 34 votes · 184 reads

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• Let blockheads read what blockheads wrote.

  

  Lord Chesterfield

  PoliticianBritish1694 · 17th century

  3.8 · 49 votes · 85 reads

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• Let me walk three weeks in the footsteps of my enemy, carry the same burden, have the same trials as he, before I say one word to criticize.

  A

  Anonymous

  4.5 · 21 votes · 42 reads

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• Lexicographer: a Writerof dictionaries, a harmless drudge, that busies himself in tracing the original, and detailing the signification of words.

  

  Samuel Johnson

  AuthorBritish1709 · 18th century

  3.3 · 39 votes · 187 reads

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• Literary imagination is an aesthetic object offered by a Writerto a lover of books.

  G

  Gaston Bachelard

  PoetFrench1884 · 19th century

  3.3 · 37 votes · 48 reads

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• Literature always anticipates life. It does not copy it, but moulds it to its purpose. The nineteenth century, as we know it, is largely an invention of Balzac.

  

  Oscar Wilde

  PoetIrish1854 · 19th century

  3.1 · 13 votes · 37 reads

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• Literature could be said to be a sort of disciplined technique for arousing certain emotions.

  I

  Iris Murdoch

  NovelistBritish1919 · 20th century

  4.5 · 35 votes · 13 reads

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• Literature does not exist in a vacuum. Writers as such have a definite social function exactly proportional to their ability as writers. This is their main use.

  E

  Ezra Pound

  PoetAmerican1885 · 19th century

  4.7 · 29 votes · 27 reads

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• Literature is a defense against the attacks of life. It says to life: ''You can't deceive me. I know your habits, foresee and enjoy watching all your reactions, and steal your secret by involving you in cunning obstructions that halt your normal flow.''

  C

  Cesare Pavese

  PoetItaly1908 · 20th century

  4.4 · 60 votes · 37 reads

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• Literature is a toil and a snare, a curse that bites deep.

  

  D. H. Lawrence

  WriterEnglish1885 · 19th century

  4.0 · 11 votes · 176 reads

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• Literature is analysis after the event.

  D

  Doris Lessing

  WriterBritish1919 · 20th century

  4.1 · 32 votes · 129 reads

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• Literature is news that stays news.

  E

  Ezra Pound

  PoetAmerican1885 · 19th century

  3.7 · 32 votes · 164 reads

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• Literature is not exhaustible, for the sufficient and simple reason that a single book is not. A book is not an isolated entity: it is a narration, an axis of innumerable narrations. One literature differs from another, either before or after it, not so m

  

  Jorge Luis Borges

  WriterArgentinian1899 · 19th century

  4.2 · 59 votes · 68 reads

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• Literature is where I go to explore the highest and lowest places in human society and in the human spirit, where I hope to find not absolute truth but the truth of the tale, of the imagination and of the heart.

  S

  Saint Thomas Aquinas

  TheologianRoman1224 · 13th century

  3.1 · 35 votes · 117 reads

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• Literature that is not the breath of contemporary society, that dares not transmit the pains and fears of that society, that does not warn in time against threatening moral and social dangers - such literature does not deserve the name of literature; it i

  A

  Alexander Solzhenitsyn

  NovelistRussian1918 · 20th century

  4.7 · 9 votes · 132 reads

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• Many readers judge of the power of a book by the shock it gives their feelings -as some savage tribes determine the power of muskets by their recoil; that being considered best which fairly prostrates the purchaser.

  

  Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

  PoetAmerican1807 · 19th century

  3.8 · 28 votes · 176 reads

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Page 2 of 5 · 344 quotes about literature

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