Quotes on Literature

When did the future switch from being a promise to a threat?

The most violent appetites in all creatures are lust and hunger; the first is a perpetual call upon them to propagate their kind, the latter to preserve themselves.

Among all kinds of Writing, there is none in which Authors are more apt to miscarry than in Works of Humour, as there is none in which they are more ambitious to excel.

A good traveller is one who does not know where he is going to, and a perfect traveller does not know where he came from.

Just a little help, a small security force, a bit of food, can save lives

If photography is allowed to stand in for art in some of its functions it will soon supplant or corrupt it completely thanks to the natural support it will find in the stupidity of the multitude. It must return to its real task, which is to be the servant of the sciences and the arts, but the very humble servant, like printing and shorthand which have neither created nor supplanted literature.

The utmost extent of man's knowledge, is to know that he knows nothing.

The intellectual is different from the ordinary man, but only in certain sections of his personality, and even then not all the time.

Oceania was at war with Eurasia; therefore Oceania had always been at war with Eurasia.

To survive it is often necessary to fight and to fight you have to dirty yourself.

A tragic situation exists precisely when virtue does not triumph but when it is still felt that man is nobler than the forces which destroy him.

Mankind is not likely to salvage civilization unless he can evolve a system of good and evil which is independent of heaven and hell.

The nationalist not only does not disapprove of atrocities committed by his own side, but he has a remarkable capacity for not even hearing about them.

We may find in the long run that tinned food is a deadlier weapon than the machine-gun.

I WAS born a slave; but I never knew it till six years of happy childhood had passed away

As we are all solipsists, and all die, the world dies with us. Only very minor literature aims at apocalypse.

Is there not some chosen curse, some hidden thunder in the stores of heaven, red with uncommon wrath, to blast the man who owes his greatness to his country's ruin!

The chief ingredients in the composition of those qualities that gain esteem and praise, are good nature, truth, good sense, and good breeding.

I am trying to make clear through my writing something which I believe: that biography- history in general- can be literature in the deepest and highest sense of that term.

Do you know what we are those of us who count as pillars of society? We are society's tools, neither more nor less.

Very broadly, literature concerns itself with the internal, cinema with the external.