Top Literature Quotes
When I was young my Father used to tell me that the two most worthwhile pursuits in life were the pursuit of truth and of beauty and I believe that Alfred Nobel must have felt much the same when he gave these prizes for literature and the sciences.
Frederick Sanger
The moral backbone of literature is about that whole question of memory. To my mind it seems clear that those who have no memory have the much greater chance to lead happy lives.
W. G. Sebald
We shall suffer no attachment to literature, no taste for abstract discussion, no love of purely intellectual theories, to seduce us from our devotion to the cause of the oppressed, the down trodden, the insulted and injured masses of our fellow men.
George Ripley
I didn't choose literature. Literature chose me. There was no decision on my side.
Manuel Puig
Few are there that will leave the secure seclusion of the scholar's life, the peaceful walks of literature and learning, to stand out a target for the criticism of unkind and hostile minds.
Felix Adler
All Literature Quotes
In a very real sense, people who have read good literature have lived more than people who cannot or will not read.
S. I. Hayakawa 
59% of people like this quote
What has influenced my life more than any other single thing has been my stammer. Had I not stammered I would probably... have gone to Cambridge as my brothers did, perhaps have become a don and every now and then published a dreary book about French literature.
W. Somerset Maugham 
59% of people like this quote
Great literature is simply language charged with meaning to the utmost possible degree.
Ezra Pound 
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What makes literature interesting is that it does not survive its translation. The characters in a novel are made out of the sentences. That's what their substance is.
Jonathan Miller 
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This is not writing at all. Indeed, I could say that Shakespeare surpasses literature altogether, if I knew what I meant.
Virginia Woolf 
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Melville brought to the task a sound knowledge of actual whaling, much curious learning in the literature of the subject, and, above all, an imagination which worked with great power upon the facts of his own experience.
Carl Clinton Van Doren 
58% of people like this quote
Popular Literature Authors
Mason CooleyOscar WildeJohann Wolfgang von GoetheSamuel ButlerThomas CarlyleGilbert K. ChestertonGeorge SantayanaDavid Herbert LawrenceAldous HuxleyRobert Louis StevensonGeorge OrwellGertrude SteinHenry MillerE. M. ForsterW. Somerset Maugham
Ernest HemingwayVirginia WoolfCharles BaudelaireThomas HuxleyHelen KellerJean-Paul SartreJim RohnT. S. EliotManuel PuigSamuel Taylor ColeridgeDenis DiderotC. S. LewisJean CocteauAlfred North WhiteheadGore Vidal
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Robert Duvall
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Howard Nemerov