Top 1200 Comparative Literature Quotes & Sayings - Page 3
Explore popular Comparative Literature quotes.
Last updated on April 15, 2025.
Of course the illusion of art is to make one believe that great literature is very close to life, but exactly the opposite is true. Life is amorphous, literature is formal.
Literature is breathing. I teach literature the way someone else might teach First Aid.
You can travel through literature, and you can expand your mind through literature. It's so cheap to buy that kind of ticket.
Literature makes history come to life. It is maybe the most accurate depiction of history, especially literature that was written in the time period depicted in the story.
I agree that one can't dispense with the reins and the whip altogether, for knaves find their way even into literature, but no thinking will discover a better police for literature than the critics and the author's own conscience.
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.
Literature has as one of its principal allures that it tells you something about life that life itself can't tell you. I just thought literature is a thing that human beings do.
Literature has done great work for feminism - writing and reading are a practice of empathy - and great literature will continue to do so.
...I have come to make distinctions between what I call the academy and literature, the moral equivalents of church and God. The academy may lie, but literature tries to tell the truth.
There's this idea that if you want to write, you shouldn't study literature because then you're dissecting what you love, and you should keep your love of literature pure. I think that's kind of silly.
The struggle of literature is in fact a struggle to escape from the confines of language; it stretches out from the utmost limits of what can be said; what stirs literature is the call and attraction of what is not in the dictionary.
Margaret Atwood was the author who took me out of children's literature and guided me towards adult literature.
I don't think any novelist should be concerned with literature…literature should be left to essayists.
To a true-blue professor of literature in an American university, literature is not something that a plain human being, living today, painfully sits down to produce. No; it is something dead.
The important thing is to do what you most love in the best way. If you love literature, you could be a great writer and perhaps one day become a Nobel Prize Laureate for Literature.
Poverty, therefore, was comparative. One measured it by a sliding scale. One was always poor, in terms of those who were richer.
Literature and fiction are two entirely different things. Literature is a luxury; fiction is a necessity.
Occasionally, I just need to escape from my work or be reminded of the comparative bliss of my own life, so I pick up a novel.
Literature has low enough standards. But we can avoid writing the worst literature if we make ourselves ask ourselves, every two or three sentences we write, 'Is that what I really think?'
Literature is no one’s private ground, literature is common ground; let us trespass freely and fearlessly and find our own way for ourselves.
I conclude now I have no inner resources, because I am heavy bored. Peoples bore me, literature bores me, especially great literature.
Writer's make national literature, while translators make universal literature.
Literature ceases to be literature when it commits itself to moral uplift; it becomes moral philosophy or some such dull thing.
The writer asks himself, 'Can I think of a plot that will parallel this? Can I take this work of literature as an example of something I might produce?' Let us, then, consider literature as a productive science.
Literature transmits incontrovertible condensed experience... from generation to generation. In this way literature becomes the living memory of a nation.
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.
I had an older brother who was very interested in literature, so I had an early exposure to literature, and and theater. My father sometimes would work in musical comedies.
If we did not bring to the examinations of our instincts a knowledge of their comparative dignity we could never learn it from them.
I do lots of reading and speaking at many universities about literature and also about politics, which is as much a part of my life as the literature.
Food-addiction, or food-drunkenness, is an old story in Hygienic literature. This is the first mention I have seen of it in "regular" medical literature. I fear to hope that its recognition spells progress.
Real literature is something much better than a harmless instrument for getting through idle hours. The purpose of great literature is to help us to develop into full human beings.
I wasn't reading it [the Bible] as literature. I was reading it as literature, and as history, and as a moral guide, and as anthropology and law and culture.
It is customary for the recipient of this award to offer personal or scholarly comment on the nature and the direction of literature. At this particular time, however, I think it would be well to consider the high duties and the responsibilities of the makers of literature.
Ideas are interesting to me, and religions are a place where ideas have been very subtly embodied for thousands of years. All literature started as sacred literature.
Literature incarnates its meanings as concretely as possible. The knowledge that literature gives of a subject is the kind of knowledge that is obtained by (vicariously) living through an experience.
I think literature can make familiar the unfamiliar, and the unfamiliar is very much about the dispossessed, and so the value of literature seems to me to go into the stories that not everybody wants to tell.
Literature is the adventure. It's the story, it's the fight, it's people falling in love, it's people with deep personality disorders who succeed anyway beyond themselves. That's what great literature is.
My works are Chinese literature, which is part of world literature. They show the life of Chinese people as well as the country's unique culture and folk customs.
The problem with the screenplay is that it's not literature, and it's not a film. It's a very weird, technical kind of blueprint that will be absolutely transformed into something else that is not that, you know? Honestly, a screenplay is no literature.
Hindu religious literature, indeed all religious literature, is full of illustrations to prove the truth.
When we seem to have won or lost in terms of certainties, we must, as literature teachers in the classroom, remember such warnings -- let literature teach us that there are no certainties, that the process is open, and that it may be altogether salutary that it is so.
It is a fact that the classics of Yiddish literature are also the classics of the modern Hebrew literature.
No fiction is worth reading except for entertainment. If it entertains and is clean, it is good literature, or its kind. If it forms the habit of reading, in people who might not read otherwise, it is the best literature.
In general, literature is a natural adversary of totalitarianism. Tyrannical governments all view literature in the same way: as their enemy. I lived for a long time in a totalitarian state, and I know firsthand that horror.
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.
I didn't read so much Japanese literature. Because my father was a teacher of Japanese literature, I just wanted to do something else.
What is literature, really? Boiled down to a single sentence, I'd say it's this: an endless conversation about what it means to be human. And to read literature is to engage in that conversation.
Comparative criticism teaches us that moral and aesthetic defects are more nearly related than is commonly supposed.
The important task of literature is to free man, not to censor him, and that is why Puritanism was the most destructive and evil force which ever oppressed people and their literature: it created hypocrisy, perversion, fears, sterility.
I was editing Canadian Literature. I didn't want to let Canadian Literature go, so they reached a nice compromise by which I received half a professor's salary.
A surprising number of people - including many students of literature - will tell you they haven't really lived in a book since they were children. Sadly, being taught literature often destroys the life of the books.
Literature speaks the language of the imagination, and the study of literature is supposed to train and improve the imagination.
Literature is an ethical leap. It is a moral decision. A perilous exercise in constant failure. Literature should have grievances, because there are so many grievances in the world.
National literature does not mean much these days; now is the age of world literature, and every one must contribute to hasten thearrival of that age.
In my case, literature is a kind of revenge. It's something that gives me what real life can't give me - all the adventures, all the suffering. All the experiences I can only live in the imagination, literature completes.
I look at western literature and especially North American literature, and I feel like it gets bogged down so much with all of that, with domestic stories and relationships and a woman dealing with the loss of her husband.
The world does not need more Christian literature. What it needs is more Christians writing good literature.
I'm delighted when people respond with passion and readily intensity to my work. Literature is not as the economist would put it a positional good; in other words, there is infinite space for good literature.
Once I got into college, I discovered literature - in particular, multicultural literature. I just started to understand the power of story and narrative, and you know, like anyone else, I kind of wanted to do it, too.
Let us not kid ourselves; let us remember that literature is of no use whatever, except in the very special case of somebody's wishing to become, of all things, a Professor of Literature.
