That is part of the beauty of all literature. You discover that your longings are universal longings, that you're not lonely and isolated from anyone. You belong.
~Humor.~--The genius of the Spanish people is exquisitely subtile, without being at all acute: hence there is so much humor and so little wit in their literature. The genius of the Italians, on the contrary, is acute, profound, and sensual, but not subtile; hence what they think to be humorous is merely witty.--_Coleridge._
The proper task of literature lies in the domain of belief.
Romance is the poetry of literature.
What counts in a man or in a nation is not what the man or the nation can do, but what he or it actually does. [“Productive Scholarship,” History as Literature , 1913.]
This was my first indication of the quality I feel is most characteristic of Zora’s work: racial health; a sense of black people as complete, complex, undiminished human beings, a sense that is lacking in so much black writing and literature.
It is the Law of Influence that WE BECOME LIKE THOSE WHOM WE HABITUALLY ADMIRE. Through all the range of literature, of history, and biography this law presides. Men are all mosaics of other men. There was a savour of David about Jonathan and a savour of Jonathan about David. Jean Valjean, in the masterpiece of Victor Hugo, is Bishop Bienvenu risen from the dead. Metempsychosis is a fact. The Changed Life, p. 31.
There is a great discovery still to be made in literature, that of paying literary men by the quantity they do not write.
Only the very weak-minded refuse to be influenced by literature and poetry. ― Cassandra Clare
Wharton quotes Johnson as saying of Dr. Campbell, "He is the richest author that ever grazed the common of literature." For his chaste Muse employ'd her heaven-taught lyre None but the noblest passions to inspire, Not one immoral, one corrupted thought, One line which, dying, he could wish to blot.
Maxim or aphorism, let us remember that this wisdom of life is the true salt of literature; that those books are most nourishing which are most richly stored with it, and that it is one of the main objects ... which men ought to seek in the reading of books.
I'm always astounded at the way we automatically look at what divides and separates us. We never look at what people have in common. If you see it, black and white people, both sides look to see the differences, they don't look at what they have together. Men and women, and old and young, and so on. And this is a disease of the mind, the way I see it.
[Footnote 1: The reader is reminded that these lectures were published in 1891, before English theologians had reached any generally received results in the study of the dates of the various parts of the Old Testament. It would be more correct now to substitute 'the Pentateuch' in the above sentence for the 'Old Testament.' For a statement of the modern views of the several periods to which the different books may be assigned, see Canon Driver's _Introduction to the Literature of the Old Testament_.]
In literature to-day there are plenty good masons, but few good architects.
Shakespeare is the greatest intellect who, in our recorded world, has left record of himself in the way of literature. I know not such power of vision, such faculty of thought in any other man, such calmness of depth; placid joyous strength; all things imaged in that great soul of his so true and clear, as in a tranquil unfathomable sea. A perfectly level mirror, that is to say withal, a man justly related to all things and men, a good man.
Liter? humaniores=--Polite literature; arts in a university.
There never was a talent, even for real literature, but was primarily a talent for something infinitely better of the silent kind.
Quotes by people born this day, already used as QOTD: I'm always astounded at the way we automatically look at what divides and separates us. We never look at what people have in common. If you see it, black and white people, both sides look to see the differences, they don't look at what they have together. Men and women, and old and young, and so on. And this is a disease of the mind, the way I see it.
The highest problem of literature is the writing of a Bible.
Great literature, past or present, is the expression of great knowledge of the human heart; great art is the expression of a solution of the conflict between the demands of the world without and that within.
We cultivate literature on a little oatmeal.
The literature of a people must spring from the sense of its nationality; and nationality is impossible without self-respect, and self-respect is impossible without liberty.--_Mrs. Stowe._
Change is the principal feature of our age and literature should explore how people deal with it. The best science fiction does that, head-on.
If history could prove and teach us anything, it would be the private ownership of the means of production as a necessary requisite of civilization and material well-being. All civilizations have up to now been based on private property. Only nations committed to the principle of private property have risen above penury and produced science, art, and literature. There is no experience to show that any other social system could provide mankind with any of the achievements of civilization. [ Socialism , New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1951, p. 583.]
No literature is complete until the language in which it is written is dead.
Books are the money of Literature, but only the counters of Science.
Man has a silent and solitary literature written by his heart upon the tables of stone in Nature; and next to God's finger, a man's heart writes the most memorable things.
Judging by contemporary literature, there are numbers of highly cultivated and indeed superior persons to whom the material world is altogether contemptible; who can see nothing in a handful of garden soil, or a rusty nail, but types of the passive and the corruptible.
In science read the newest works; in literature, the oldest.
To me, literature is a calling, even a kind of salvation. It connects me with an enterprise that is over 2,000 years old. What do we have from the past? Art and thought. That's what lasts. That's what continues to feed people and give them an idea of something better. A better state of one's feelings or simply the idea of a silence in one's self that allows one to think or to feel. Which to me is the same.
Literary men are . . . a perpetual priesthood.
It has been assumed in economic literature that the greater the volume of individual money savings the greater would be the supply of new capital goods automatically resulting therefrom. The truth of the matter is, however, that if all individuals should reduce their consumption, say, by 25 per cent, with a view to expanding the supply of funds in the investment market available for new capital construction, the curtailment of consumption involved would blot out the potential demand for the goods which might be produced by the new capital. The facts of industrial history show conclusively that the only period when new capital goods increase rapidly is during a period when consumption is also rapidly expanding and giving rise to an effective demand for new capital. [ The Financial Organization of Society , Washington, D.C.: The Brookings Institution, 1930, p. 736.]
The good writing of any age has always been the product of someone's neurosis, and we'd have a mighty dull literature if all the writers that came along were a bunch of happy chuckleheads.
Science and literature are not two things, but two sides of one thing.
In the morning I bathe my intellect in the stupendous philosophy of the Bhagavad Gita... in comparison with which... our modern world and its literature seems puny and trivial.
If the fires of freedom and civil liberties burn low in other lands they must be made brighter in our own. If in other lands the press and books and literature of all kinds are censored, we must redouble our efforts here to keep them free. If in other lands the eternal truths of the past are threatened by intolerance we must provide a safe place for their perpetuation.
Science is like literature, a continuing dialog among diverse and conflicting voices, no one ever wholly right or wholly wrong, but a steady conversation forever provisional and personal and living.
Whatever in literature, art, or religion is done for money is poisonous itself, and doubly deadly in preventing the hearing or seeing of the noble literature and art which have been done for love and truth.
Libraries are the wardrobes of literature, whence men, properly informed, might bring forth something for ornament, much for curiosity, and more for use.
The volume herewith presented is the natural result of the compiler's habit of transferring and classifying significant passages from known authors. No special course of reading has been pursued, the thoughts being culled from foreign and native tongues--from the moss-grown tomes of ancient literature and the verdant fields of to-day. The terse periods of others, appropriately quoted, become in a degree our own; and a just estimation is very nearly allied to originality, or, as the author of _Vanity Fair_ tells us, "Next to excellence is the appreciation of it." Without indorsing the idea of a modern authority that the multiplicity of facts and writings is becoming so great that every available book must soon be composed of extracts only, still it is believed that such a volume as "Pearls of Thought" will serve the interest of general literature, and especially stimulate the mind of the thoughtful reader to further research. The pleasant duty of the compiler has been to follow the expressive idea of Colton, and he has made the same use of books as a bee does of flowers,--she steals the sweets from them, but does not injure them.
Our high respect for a well-read man is praise enough of literature.
It is the glorious doom of literature that the evil perishes and the good remains.
If the invention of derivatives was the financial world's modernist dawn, the current crisis is unsettlingly like the birth of postmodernism. For anyone who studied literature in college in the past few decades, there is a weird familiarity about the current crisis: value, in the realm of finance capital, parallels the elusive nature of meaning in deconstrucitonism. According to Jacques Derrida, the doyen of the school, meaning can never be precisely located; instead, it is always 'deferred,' moved elsewhere, located in other meanings, which refer and defer to other meanings—a snake permanently and necessarily eating its own tail. This process is fluid and constant, but at moments the perpetual process of deferral stalls and collapses in on itself. Derrida called this moment an 'aporia,' from a Greek term meaning 'impasse.' There is something both amusing and appalling about seeing his theories acted out in the world markets to such cataclysmic effect.
Writing is not literature unless it gives to the reader a pleasure which arises not only from the things said, but from the way in which they are said; and that pleasure is only given when the words are carefully or curiously or beautifully put together into sentences.
Hawkesworth said of Johnson, "You have a memory that would convict any author of plagiarism in any court of literature in the world."
Good taste cannot supply the place of genius in literature, for the best proof of taste, when there is no genius, would be not to write at all.
If we clear the metaphysical element out of modern literature, we shall find its bulk amazingly diminished, and the claims of the remaining writers, or of those whom we have thinned by this abstraction of their straw-stuffing, much more easily adjusted.
The first lesson of literature, no less than of life, is the learning how to burn one's own smoke.
Cleverness is a sort of genius for instrumentality. It is the brain of the hand. In literature, cleverness is more frequently accompanied by wit, genius, and sense, than by humor.--_Coleridge._
We cultivate literature on a little oatmeal.
Just as little can we afford to follow the doctrinaires of an impossible — and incidentally of a highly undesirable — social revolution which, in destroying individual rights — including property rights — and the family, would destroy the two chief agents in the advance of mankind, and the two chief reasons why either the advance or the preservation of mankind is worthwhile. It is an evil and a dreadful thing to be callous to sorrow and suffering and blind to our duty to do all things possible for the betterment of social conditions. But it is an unspeakably foolish thing to strive for this betterment by means so destructive that they would leave no social conditions to better. In dealing with all these social problems, with the intimate relations of the family, with wealth in private use and business use, with labor, with poverty, the one prime necessity is to remember that, though hardness of heart is a great evil, it is no greater an evil than softness of head. [“Biological Analogies in History,” History as Literature , 1913.]
Fiction is no longer a mere amusement; but transcendent genius, accommodating itself to the character of the age, has seized upon this province of literature, and turned fiction from a toy into a mighty engine.--_Channing._
This was another of our fears: that Life wouldn't turn out to be like Literature.
Only the very weak-minded refuse to be influenced by literature and poetry.
Critics are men who have failed in literature and art.
Art, not less eloquently than literature, teaches her children to venerate the single eye.
Talent for literature, thou hast such a talent? Believe it not, be slow to believe it! To speak or to write, Nature did not peremptorily order thee; but to work she did.
All the other powers of literature are coy and haughty, they must be long courted, and at last are not always gained; but criticism is a goddess easy of access and forward of advance, she will meet the slow and encourage the timorous. The want of meaning she supplies with words, and the want of spirit she recompenses with malignity.--_Johnson._
Puns are the highest form of literature.
If the time given to education permits, add Latin and German. Latin, because it is the key to nearly one-half of English and to all the Romance languages; and German, because it is the key to almost all the remainder of English, and helps you to understand a race from whom most of us have sprung, and who have a character and a literature of a fateful force in the history of the world, such as probably has been allotted to those of no other people, except the Jews, the Greeks, and ourselves.
Nothing is less to be desired than the fate of a young man, who, as the Scotch proverb says, in 'trying to make a spoon spoils a horn' and becomes a mere hanger-on in literature or in science, when he might have been a useful and a valuable member of Society in other occupations.
Converse with a mind that is grandly simple, and literature looks like word-catching.
Science fiction is a literature that belongs to all humankind.
The thing that teases the mind over and over for years, and at last gets itself put down rightly on paper— whether little or great, it belongs to Literature.
All that literature has to bestow may be obtained by reading and by practical exercise in writing and in speaking; but I do not exaggerate when I say that none of the best gifts of science are to be won by these means. On the contrary, the great benefit which a scientific education bestows, whether as training or as knowledge, is dependent upon the extent to which the mind of the student is brought into immediate contact with facts--upon the degree to which he learns the habit of appealing directly to Nature, and of acquiring through his senses concrete images of those properties of things, which are, and always will be, but approximatively expressed in human language. Our way of looking at Nature, and of speaking about her, varies from year to year; but a fact once seen, a relation of cause and effect, once demonstratively apprehended, are possessions which neither change nor pass away, but, on the contrary, form fixed centres, about which other truths aggregate by natural affinity.
The best lesson that any people can learn is that there is no patent cure-all which will make the body politic perfect, and that any man who is able glibly to answer every question as to how to deal with the evils of the body politic is at best a foolish visionary and at worst an evil-minded quack. Neither doctrinaire socialism nor unrestricted individualism nor any other ism will bring about the millennium. Collectivism and individualism must be used as supplementary, not as antagonistic, philosophies. In the last analysis the welfare of a nation depends on its having throughout a healthy development. A healthy social system must of necessity represent the sum of very many moral, intellectual, and economic forces, and each such force must depend in its turn partly upon the whole system; and all these many forces are needed to develop a high grade of character in the individual men and women who make up the nation. Much of the discussion about socialism and individualism is entirely pointless, because of failure to agree on terminology. The very reason why we object to state ownership, that it puts a stop to individual initiative and to the healthy development of personal responsibility, is the reason why we object to an unsupervised, unchecked monopolistic control in private hands. We urge control and supervision by the nation as an antidote to the movement for state socialism. Those who advocate total lack of regulation, those who advocate lawlessness in the business world, themselves give the strongest impulse to what I believe would be the deadening movement toward unadulterated state socialism. [“The Thralldom of Names,” History as Literature .]
Each person has a literature inside them.
Like all the really great men of literature, Goethe added some of the qualities of the man of science to those of the artist, especially the habit of careful and patient observation of Nature. The great poet was no mere book-learned speculator. His acquaintance with mineralogy, geology, botany and osteology, the fruit of long and wide studies, would have sufficed to satisfy the requirements of a professoriate in those days, if only he could have pleaded ignorance of everything else. Unfortunately for Goethe's credit with his scientific contemporaries, and, consequently, for the attention attracted by his work, he did not come forward as a man of science until the public had ranged him among the men of literature. And when the little men have thus classified a big man, they consider that the last word has been said about him; it appears to the thought hardly decent on his part if he venture to stray beyond the speciality they have assigned to him. It does not seem to occur to them that a clear intellect is an engine capable of supplying power to all sorts of mental factories; nor to admit that, as Goethe somewhere pathetically remarks, a man may have a right to live for himself as well as for the public; to follow the line of work that happens to interest him, rather than that which interests them.
Take a commonplace, clean it and polish it, light it so that it produces the same effect of youth and freshness and originality and spontaneity as it did originally, and you have done a poet’s job. The rest is literature.
The decline of literature indicates the decline of the nation. The two keep pace in their downward tendency.
When literature is the sole business of life, it becomes a drudgery. When we are able to resort to it only at certain hours, it is a charming relaxation. In my earlier days I was a banker's clerk, obliged to be at the desk everyday from ten till five o'clock; and I shall never forget the delight with which, on returning home, I used to read and write during the evening.--_Rogers._
Professional critics are incapable of distinguishing and appreciating either diamonds in the rough state or gold in bars. They are traders, and in literature know only the coins that are current. Their critical laboratory has scales and weights, but neither crucible nor touchstone.
Woe to that nation whose literature is cut short by the intrusion of force. This is not merely interference with freedom of the press but the sealing up of a nation's heart, the excision of its memory.
Well, because my name is Amy Cross, and I read romance novels – proudly. I don't care if a hundred people hear me snort with laughter, flush at the embarrassing connotations of black and white words, or flash naked men on the front covers of my reads. Fine literature can only be defined by how hot the sex scenes are. Well, at least in my book.
Sentimental literature, concerned with the analysis and description of emotion, headed by the poetry of Byron, is altogether of lower rank than the literature which merely describes what it saw.
What is wonderful about great literature is that it transforms the man who reads it towards the condition of the man who wrote, and brings to birth in us also the creative impulse.
Every man's work, whether it be literature or music or pictures or architecture or anything else, is always a portrait of himself.
The good citizen will demand liberty for himself, and as a matter of pride he will see to it that others receive the liberty which he thus claims as his own. Probably the best test of true love of liberty in any country is the way in which minorities are treated in that country. Not only should there be complete liberty in matters of religion and opinion, but complete liberty for each man to lead his life as he desires, provided only that in so doing he does not wrong his neighbor…. In every civilized society property rights must be carefully safeguarded; ordinarily, and in the great majority of cases, human rights and property rights are fundamentally and in the long run identical; but when it clearly appears that there is a real conflict between them, human rights must have the upper hand, for property belongs to man and not man to property…. We can just as little afford to follow the doctrinaires of an extreme individualism as the doctrinaires of an extreme socialism…. It is not the critic who counts, not the man who points out how the strong man stumbled, or where the doer of deeds could have done better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena; whose face is marred by the dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs and comes short again and again; who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotions and spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best, knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who, at worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly; so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who know neither victory or defeat. [“Citizenship in a Republic,” Speech delivered at the Sorbonne, Paris, April 23, 1910. History as Literature (1913).]