Literature Quotes

But what is the difference between literature and journalism... Journalism is unreadable and literature is not read. That is all.

Oscar Wilde

Literature is the art of writing something that will be read twice journalism what will be read once.

Cyril Connolly

Studying literature at Harvard is like learning about women at the Mayo Clinic.

Roy Blount Jr.

To encourage literature and the arts is a duty which every good citizen owes to his country.

George Washington

Literature is my Utopia. Here I am not disenfranchised. No barrier of the senses shuts me out from the sweet, gracious discourses of my book friends. They talk to me without embarrassment or awkwardness.

Helen Kelle

Develop interest in life as you see it; in people, things, literature, music - The world is so rich, simply throbbing with rich treasures, beautiful souls and interesting people. Forget yourself.

Henry Mille

Literature is the art of writing something that will be read twice; journalism what will be read once.

Cyril Connolly, Enemies of Promise (1938)

When I read great literature, great drama, speeches, or sermons, I feel that the human mind has not achieved anything greater than the ability to share feelings and thoughts through language.

James Earl Jones

Literature is my Utopia. Here I am not disenfranchised. No barrier of the sense shuts me out from the sweet, gracious discourse of my book friends. They talk to me without embarrassment or awkwardness.

Hellen Kelle

The very essence of literature is the war between emotion and intellect, between life and death. When literature becomes too intellectual - - when it begins to ignore the passions, the motions - - It becomes sterile, silly, and actually without substance.

Isaac Bashevis Singe

Books are the carriers of civilization. Without books, history is silent, literature dumb, science crippled, thought and speculation at a standstill.

Barbara Tuchman

Literature is strewn with the wreckage of men who have minded beyond reason the opinions of others.

Virginia Woolf

The tendinous part of the mind, so to speak, is more developed in winter the fleshy, in summer. I should say winter had given the bone and sinew to literature, summer the tissues and the blood.

John Burroughs

Literature is the human activity that takes the fullest and most precise account of variousness, possibility, complexity, and difficulty.

Lionel Trilling

It is only by introducing the young to great literature, drama and music, and to the excitement of great science that we open to them the possibilities that lie within the human spirit - - Enable them to see visions and dream dreams.

Eric Anderson

Literature is the orchestration of platitudes.

Thornton

We know too much, and are convinced of too little. Our literature is a substitute for religion, and so is our religion.

T. S. Eliot

My main reason for adopting literature as a profession was that, as the author is never seen by his clients, he need not dress respectably.

George Bernard Shaw

Literature is a luxury fiction is a necessity.

G. K. Chesterton

Life comes before literature, as the material always comes before the work. The hills are full of marble before the world blooms with statues.

Phillips Brooks

The difficulty of literature is not to write, but to write what you mean not to affect your reader, but to affect him precisely as you wish.

Robert Louis Stephenson

Literature is strewn with the wreckage of those who have minded beyond reason the opinion of others.

Virginia Woolf

Jokes of the proper kind, properly told, can do more to enlighten questions of politics, philosophy, and literature than any number of dull arguments.

Isaac Asimov

The tendinous part of the mind, so to speak, is more developed in winter; the fleshy, in summer. I should say winter had given the bone and sinew to literature, summer the tissues and the blood.

John Burroughs, The Snow - Walkers

Books are the carriers of civilization. Without books, history is silent, literature dumb, science crippled, thought and speculation at a standstill. I think that there is nothing, not even crime, more opposed to poetry, to philosophy, ay, to life itself than this incessant business.

Henry David Thoreau

We pass the word around we ponder how the case is put by different people, we read the poetry we meditate over the literature we play the music we change our minds we reach an understanding. Society evolves this way, not by shouting each other down, but by the unique capacity of unique, individual human beings to comprehend each other.

Lewis Thomas

But what is the difference between literature and journalism? ... Journalism is unreadable and literature is not read. That is all.

Oscar Wilde, The Critic as Artist, 1891

In a real sense, people who have read good literature have lived more than people who cannot or will not read. It is not true that we have only one life to live; if we can read, we can live as many more lives and as many kinds of lives as we wish.

S. I. Hayakawa

Even in literature and art, no man who bothers about originality will ever be original whereas if you simply try to tell the truth without caring twopence how often it has been told before you will, nine times out of ten, become original without ever having noticed it.

Clive Staples Lewis

Develop interest in life as you see it in people, things, literature, music - The world is so rich, simply throbbing with rich treasures, beautiful souls and interesting people. Forget yourself.

Henry Mille

What we call education and culture is for the most part nothing but the substitution of reading for experience, of literature for life, of the obsolete fictitious for the contemporary real.

George Bernard Shaw

We pass the word around; we ponder how the case is put by different people, we read the poetry; we meditate over the literature; we play the music; we change our minds; we reach an understanding. Society evolves this way, not by shouting each other down, but by the unique capacity of unique, individual human beings to comprehend each other.

Lewis Thomas, The Medusa and the Snail (1979)

Depend upon it, after all, Thomas, Literature is the most noble of professions. In fact, it is about the only one fit for a man. For my own part, there is no seducing me from the path.

Edgar Allan Poe, From a letter to Frederick W. Thomas (February 14, 1849).

Literature should not be surpressed merely because it affects the moral code of the censor.

William Orville Douglas

There are three things men can do with women love them, suffer for them, or turn them into literature.

Stephen Stills

Sigmund Freud was a half baked Viennese quack. Our literature, culture, and the the films of Woody Allen would be better today if Freud had never written a word.

Ian Shoales

Literature is the art of writing something that will be read twice journalism what will be grasped at once.

Cyril Connolly

In literature as in love, we are astonished at what is chosen by others.

Andre Maurois