Top 1200 Great Literature Quotes & Sayings - Page 3

A great memory does not make a mind, any more than a dictionary is a piece of literature.

I love the Russian classics very much, the Russian classical literature. But I also read modern literature. As far as Russian literature is concerned, I am very fond of Tolstoy and Chekhov, and I also enjoy reading Gogol very much.

We enjoy the great prophets of literature most when we have not yet lived enough to realize all they tell us.

It is doubtless one of Aristotle's great services that he conceived so clearly the truth that literature is a thing that grows and has a history.

Balzac, you know, our great Balzac, he wrote interesting things about how in literature you keep distance in order to express great feelings. You have to keep a distance - and it's exactly the same with acting.

As society diversifies, the number of people who read literature is decreasing. It will be difficult for readers to digest my ideas through literature.

When I was a kid, I went through the whole process of reading great literature and trying to be very widely read.

All great literature has an uncreeded and luminous theology behind it... Art [is] a form of active prayer.

Hopefully, reading and being around great literature inspires me to write songs, but I'm not sure about that.

Great literature is like moral leadership; everyone deplores the lack of it, but there is a tendency to prefer it from the safely dead.

I have . . . a deep concern with the development of a literature worthy of our past, and of our destiny; without which literature certainly, we can never come to much. I have a deep concern with the development of an audience worthy of such a literature.

I refuse to see literature as amusement, as a game. I think that you ought not to approach literature without a moral responsibility for every word you write.

For this reason, to study English literature without some general knowledge of the relation of the Bible to that literature would be to leave one's literary education very incomplete.

A taste for the best reading is not cultivated in Spanish girls, even where the treasures of that great Castilian literature are accessible to them.

I am especially indebted to a 10th grade English teacher who encouraged me to read great works of literature.

We shouldn't teach great books; we should teach a love of reading. Knowing the contents of a few works of literature is a trivial achievement. Being inclined to go on reading is a great achievement.

In some ways, getting published in children's literature is a little more open than publishing adult literature. It's less hinged on who you might know.

I love and care about literature, and great writers are our teachers. You're studying their mind when you read their work.

Great literature rattles the mind and makes the body sing. It's an unmistakable, electric feeling, and too rare. That is what I want.

There is a great discovery still to be made in literature, that of paying literary men by the quantity they do not write.

One of the great joys of my job is that you spend a huge amount of time investigating different areas of literature.

For me, literature is the daughter of music: a bit heavy and more level headed than its mother. Literature submits to the same principles of successive perception, which allows it to build progressively.

Literature has always been a part of my life. I studied history and literature in college. My mother is a novelist; I grew up around books.

If you can imagine the story of the world as a giant movie, to not have some understanding of the Bible - its story, its history, and its impact - would be like watching a great movie and removing part of the plot. It can't be done. The real truth is that everyone regardless of faith tradition benefits from knowing and understanding these aspects of the Bible. It enhances one's knowledge of literature, science, art etc. It's difficult to read any classic work of literature for instance and not see biblical allusions.

Literature hasn't come up with any new themes. The literature of all different times - it's still dealing with how one resolves issues of existence.

It's an absurd error to put modern English literature in the curriculum. You should read contemporary literature for pleasure or not at all. You shouldn't be taught to monkey with it.

Time the great destroyer of other men's happiness, only enlarges the patrimony of literature to its possessor.

The memoir by women, read by female readers, is considered a market form, not "great literature."

Do you realize that all great literature is all about what a bummer it is to be a human being? Isn't it such a relief to have somebody say that?

I'm not at all snobby about book prizes and how they pollute the world of literature. Just like with the Olympics, a little bit of competition gets people truly engrossed in the business of literature.

I think so much of young adult literature sort of gets ghettoized - the title 'young adult' makes people immediately discount it. And just like with books that get written for adults, there is plenty of young adult literature that is bad. But there is also plenty of young adult literature that is brilliant.

Russia is a place of great culture. If you've read Tolstoy's "War and Peace", Dostoyevsky, Pushkin, Chekhov...the culture of the great Russian literature is amazing. The human narrative you get out of "War and Peace" is universal.

The first forms of writing emerged not for art, literature, or love, not for spiritual or liturgical purposes, but for business--all literature could be said to originate from sales receipts (sorry).

The best work in literature is always done by those who do not depend on it for their daily bread and the highest form of literature, Poetry, brings no wealth to the singer.

If England has any dignity left in the way of literature, she will forget for ever the pitiful antics of English Literature's performing flea.

I like literature that you respond to in some way. You laugh, you cry, you turn the light on - that's great, it's eliciting a response by proxy.

There isn't, even now, a great tradition of novel-writing in Afghanistan. Most of the literature is in the form of poetry.

Art begins where technique ends. There can be no real art development before one's technique is firmly established. And a great deal of technical work has to be done before the great works of violin literature, the sonatas and concertos, may be approached.

A taste for literature and a turn for business, united in the same person, never fails to make a great man.

A film carries six fine arts - it consists of architecture, painting, music, writing or literature, photography and performance. It's a conjecture of all these things and yet based on literature.

Lincoln is a genius of language and a brilliant writer who deserves to be seen as part of the canon of great writers in American literature.

I think about Chilean literature as a family, because I grew up reading the literature of my country. I feel like I have fathers and stepfathers and a lot of brothers and sisters and distant cousins and all that.

A great literature is thus chiefly the product of doubting and inquiring minds in revolt against the immovable certainties of the nation.

Literature has been the salvation of the damned, literature has inspired and guided lovers, routed despair and can perhaps in this case save the world.

Literature overtakes history, for literature gives you more than one life. It expands experience and opens new opportunities to readers.

A great work of Art demands a great thought or a thought of beauty adequately expressed. - Neither in Art nor Literature more than in Life can an ordinary thought be made interesting because well-dressed.

Literature throws us many great heroes. Real life invariably outdoes them.

Scholarship cannot do without literature.... It needs literature to float it, to set it current, to authenticate it to all the race, to get it out of closets and into the brains of men who stir abroad.

Literature is the best way to overcome death. My father, as I said, is an actor. He's the happiest man on earth when he's performing, but when the show is over, he's sad and troubled. I wish he could live in the eternal present, because in the theater everything remains in memories and photographs. Literature, on the other hand, allows you to live in the present and to remain in the pantheon of the future. Literature is a way to say, I was here, this is what I thought, this is what I perceived. This is my signature, this is my name.

One of the great themes in American literature is the individual's confrontation with the vast open spaces of the continent.

The function of literature, through all its mutations, has been to make us aware of the particularity of selves, and the high authority of the self in its quarrel with its society and its culture. Literature is in that sense subversive.

There is a tradition that sees journalism as the dark side of literature, with book writing at its zenith. I don't agree. I think that all written work constitutes literature, even graffiti.

I think literature has lost it's power. Great novels continue to be written, but they are no longer changing the world.

All literature, all philosophical treatises, all the voices of antiquity are full of examples for imitation, which would all lie unseen in darkness without the light of literature.

[People] didn't vote for me because they thought I was a racist and if you look at my campaign literature it is not much different than a lot of Republican literature and some conservative Democrats in the South.

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

The most exciting periods of literature have always been those when the critics were great.

The great subversive works of children's literature suggest that there are other views of human life besides those of the shopping mall and the corporation. They mock current assumptions and express the imaginative, unconventional, noncommercial view of the world in its simplest and purest form. They appeal to the imaginative, questioning, rebellious child within all of us, renew our instinctive energy, and act as a force for change. This is why such literature is worthy of our attention and will endure long after more conventional tales have been forgotten.

This act of empathy, that women go through from the time we're little girls - we read all of literature, all of history, it's really about boys, most of it. But I can feel more like Peter Pan than Tinker Bell, or like Wendy. I wanted to be Tom Sawyer, not Becky. And we're so used to that act of empathizing with the protagonist of a male-driven plot. I mean, that's what we've done all our lives. You read history, you read great literature, Shakespeare, it's all fellas, you know?

Herman Melville was as separated from a civilized literature as the lost Atlantis was said to have been from the great peoples of the earth.