Quotes on Literature

It is impossible to talk or to write without apparently throwing oneself helplessly open.

Faith, like a jackal, feeds among the tombs, and even from these dead doubts she gathers her most vital hope.

There are some persons in this world, who, unable to give better proof of being wise, take a strange delight in showing what they think they have sagaciously read in mankind by uncharitable suspicions of them.

To be hated cordially, is only a left-handed compliment.

Truth uncompromisingly told will always have its ragged edges.

Let us speak, though we show all our faults and weaknesses, - for it is a sign of strength to be weak, to know it, and out with it - not in a set way and ostentatiously, though, but incidentally and without premeditation.

There is one knows not what sweet mystery about this sea, whose gently awful stirrings seem to speak of some hidden soul beneath.

Art is the objectification of feeling.

It is always safe to learn, even from our enemies; seldom safe to venture to instruct, even our friends.

Contemporaries appreciate the person rather than their merit, posterity will regard the merit rather than the person.

He that knows himself, knows others; and he that is ignorant of himself, could not write a very profound lecture on other men's heads.

You may drive out nature with a pitchfork, yet she'll be constantly running back.

The world of men is dreaming, it has gone mad in its sleep, and a snake is strangling it, but it can't wake up.

Insurrection. An unsuccessful revolution; disaffection's failure to substitute misrule for bad government.

When politicians and politically minded people pay too much attention to literature, it is a bad sign - a bad sign mostly for literature. But it is also a bad sign when they don't want to hear the word mentioned.

Society honors its living conformists and its dead troublemakers.

There will still be things that machines cannot do. They will not produce great art or great literature or great philosophy; they will not be able to discover the secret springs of happiness in the human heart; they will know nothing of love and friendship.

There are men here and there to whom the whole of life is like an after-dinner hour with a cigar; easy, pleasant, empty, perhaps enlivened by some fable of strife to be forgotten - before the end is told - even if there happens to be any end to it.

Imprisoned in every fat man a thin one is wildly signalling to be let out.

A great age of literature is perhaps always a great age of translations.

In the information society, nobody thinks. We expect to banish paper, but we actually banish thought.