Quotes on Literature

Man only plays when in the full meaning of the word he is a man, and he is only completely a man when he plays.

To be clever enough to get all that money, one must be stupid enough to want it.

Legend: A lie that has attained the dignity of age.

We call a man a bigot or a slave of dogma because he is a thinker who has thought thoroughly and to a definite end.

When we really worship anything, we love not only its clearness but its obscurity. We exult in its very invisibility.

Nothing is poetical if plain daylight is not poetical; and no monster should amaze us if the normal man does not amaze.

Literature is a luxury; fiction is a necessity.

Happiness is a mystery, like religion, and should never be rationalised.

Compromise used to mean that half a loaf was better than no bread. Among modern statesmen it really seems to mean that half a loaf; is better than a whole loaf.

Man is an exception, whatever else he is. If he is not the image of God, then he is a disease of the dust. If it is not true that a divine being fell, then we can only say that one of the animals went entirely off its head.

Men always talk about the most important things to perfect strangers. In the perfect stranger we perceive man himself; the image of a God is not disguised by resemblances to an uncle or doubts of wisdom of a mustache.

There are some subjects that can only be tackled in fiction.

I do earnestly wish to see the distinction of sex confounded in society, unless where love animates the behaviour.

America is the only nation in the world that is founded on creed. That creed is set forth with dogmatic and even theological lucidity in the Declaration of Independence; perhaps the only piece of practical politics that is also theoretical politics and also great literature.

Without a knowledge of mythology much of the elegant literature of our own language cannot be understood and appreciated.

Literature is born when something in life goes slightly adrift.

For it is mutual trust, even more than mutual interest that holds human associations together. Our friends seldom profit us but they make us feel safe. Marriage is a scheme to accomplish exactly that same end.

The myth that everyone once read great literature is just a myth.

Actors are the jockeys of literature. Others supply the horses, the plays, and we simply make them run.

You'll be old and you never lived, and you kind of feel silly to lie down and die and to never have lived, to have been a job chaser and never have lived.

Taking on challenging projects is the way that one grows and extends one's range as a writer, one's technical command, so I consider the time well-spent