Quotes on Literature

Imagination is the voice of daring. If there is anything Godlike about God it is that. He dared to imagine everything.

Music is a beautiful opiate, if you don't take it too seriously.

Example moves the world more than doctrine. The great exemplars are the poets of action, and it makes little difference whether they be forces for good or forces for evil.

The first sign of corruption in a society that is still alive is that the end justifies the means.

America, I've given you all and now I'm nothing.

After great pain, a formal feeling comes. The Nerves sit ceremonious, like tombs.

It is thrifty to prepare today for the wants of tomorrow.

Do not count your chickens before they are hatched.

Better be wise by the misfortunes of others than by your own.

Because subjects like literature and art history have no obvious material pay-off, they tend to attract those who look askance at capitalist notions of utility. The idea of doing something purely for the delight of it has always rattled the grey-bearded guardians of the state. Sheer pointlessness has always been a deeply subversive affair.

That which the fountain sends forth returns again to the fountain.

However things may seem, no evil thing is success and no good thing is failure.

Therefore trust to thy heart, and to what the world calls illusions.

The pleasure we derive from the representation of the present is due, not only to the beauty it can be clothed in, but also to its essential quality of being the present.

Literature is that which he can not read without pain, without choking on truth.

Death of the Father would deprive literature of many of its pleasures. If there is no longer a Father, why tell stories? Doesn't every narrative lead back to Oedipus? Isn't storytelling always a way of searching for one's origin, speaking one's conflicts with the Law, entering into the dialectic of tenderness and hatred?

Never invoke the gods unless you really want them to appear. It annoys them very much.

Time passes, and little by little everything that we have spoken in falsehood becomes true.

Curious things, habits. People themselves never knew they had them.

If one sticks too rigidly to one's principles, one would hardly see anybody.

Jane Austen is the pinnacle to which all other authors aspire.