Quotes on Literature

He's arm'd without that's innocent within; _x000D_ Be this thy Screen, and this thy Wall of Brass.

The authour who imitates his predecessors only by furnishing himself with thoughts and elegances out of the same general magazine of literature, can with little more propriety be reproached as a plagiary, than the architect can be censured as a mean copier of Angelo or Wren, because he digs his marble out of the same quarry, squares his stones by the same art, and unites them in columns of the same orders.

That country is the richest which nourishes the greatest number of noble and happy human beings.

Life being very short, and the quiet hours of it few, we ought to waste none of them in reading valueless books.

It is his restraint that is honorable to a person, not their liberty.

There is no such thing as bad weather, only different kinds of good weather.

Doing is the great thing, for if people resolutely do what is right, they come in time to like doing it.

Modern education has devoted itself to the teaching of impudence, and then we complain that we can no longer control our mobs.

Education is the leading of human souls to what is best, and making what is best out of them.

It is far more difficult to be simple than to be complicated; far more difficult to sacrifice skill and easy execution in the proper place, than to expand both indiscriminately.

All great art is the work of the whole living creature, body and soul, and chiefly of the soul.

The gamble of literature is that I make the best work I can; the most truthful, the most representative of how I see things. I try and do that and then I put it out there and say to you, "What do you think?" I hope that you think well of it, obviously.

Human beings, you see, do absolutely two primary things. We see like and unlike. Like becomes, in literature, simile and metaphor. Unlike becomes uniqueness and difference, from which I believe, the novel is born.

Humor is the oxygen of children's literature. There's a lot of competition for children's time, but even kids who hate to read want to read a funny book.

But love's a malady without a cure.

One cannot legislate problems out of existence. It has been tried.

The key to education is the experience of beauty.

Evil is not something superhuman, it's something less than human.

When two people decide to get a divorce, it isn't a sign that they 'don't understand' one another, but a sign that they have, at last, begun to.

The most difficult crime to track is the one which is purposeless.

I never guess. It is a shocking habit destructive to the logical faculty.