Quotes
Quotes about Literature
Hawkesworth said of Johnson, "You have a memory that would convict any author of plagiarism in any court of literature in the world."
Wharton quotes Johnson as saying of Dr. Campbell, "He is the richest author that ever grazed the common of literature."
We cultivate literature on a little oatmeal.
To take Macaulay out of literature and society and put him in the House of Commons, is like taking the chief physician out of London during a pestilence.
A lawyer without history or literature is a mechanic, a mere working mason; if he possesses some knowledge of these, he may venture to call himself an architect.
Literature is the Thought of thinking Souls.
Wherever literature consoles sorrow or assuages pain; wherever it brings gladness to eyes which fail with wakefulness and tears, and ache for the dark house and the long sleep,--there is exhibited in its noblest form the immortal influence of Athens.
You know who critics are?--the men who have failed in literature and art.
In science, read, by preference the newest works; in literature, the oldest. The classics are always modern.
Take the whole range of imaginative literature, and we are all wholesale borrowers. In every matter that relates to invention, to use, or beauty or form, we are borrowers.
Life comes before literature, as the material always comes before the work. The hills are full of marble before the world blooms with statues.
Literature--the most seductive, the most deceiving, the most dangerous of professions.
To a writer the brain's greatest achievement is literature
Literature, as cities grow, becomes increasingly an expression of loneliness and exile - a cry in the dark, whistling in the dark.
A major characteristic of the young is their rejection of literature
Literature clearly has something to do with not forcing the reader into a state of mind (or physicality) which places the writer in a position of advantage over him.
People always blame art literature drama for their own evil. Or other peopleâs. Art only imitates life.
Music and literature have this in common - that the dimension they work in is time.
The reality of literature, as opposed to its appearance in written of printed records, is the organization of speech sounds, and this makes literature a temporal art, a twin of music.
Music, unlike literature, can be both synchronic and diachronic: we can read or hear it horizontally, from left to right, and vertically, from top to bottom.
It is because literature has no power to imitate the sound of music that it is led to mockery of its sister art
Music is not inert and arbitrary, but it is not iconic either. We do not know what it is, except a great and sustaining mystery. I do not think we know what literature is either.
Music is a purer art (than literature) because it has no direct relationship to human events. It is totally outside the field of moral judgment
..the people of Tudor England, like the modern Irish, were great talkers. One imagines their speech as rapid, bubbling, both earthily exact and carelessly malapropistic. It was perhaps a McLuhanesque medium, itself its own message and it exhibited the essential function of language - to maintain social contact in the dark.... Speech, when you come to think of it, is not a very exact medium: it is full of stumblings and apologies for not finding the right word; it has to be helped out with animal grunts and the gestures which, one is convinced, represent man's primal mode of communication. Take speech as a flickering auditory candle, and the mere act of maintaining its light becomes enough. Tales, gossip, riddles, word-play pass the time in the dark, and out of these - not out of the need to recount facts or state a case - springs literature.
There is no art without cheating. That is why Plato and Tolstoy condemned literature
