Quotes on Literature

There is only room in the lifeboat of your life for one, and you always choose yourself, and turn your parents into whatever it takes to keep you afloat.

All right, then, I'll go to hell.

The profoundest thoughts of the philosophers have something trickle about them. A lot disappears in order for something to suddenly appear in the palm of the hand.

With the pride of the artist, you must blow against the walls of every power that exists the small trumpet of your defiance.

The horror of the Twentieth Century was the size of each new event, and the paucity of its reverberation.

I had a quick grasp of the secret to sanity, it had become the ability to hold the maximum of impossible combinations in one's mind.

If a person is not talented enough to be a novelist, not smart enough to be a lawyer, and his hands are too shaky to perform operations, he becomes a journalist.

Once a newspaper touches a story, the facts are lost forever, even to the protagonists.

I didn't make any money from my writing until much later. I published about 80 stories for nothing. I spent on literature.

Events at home, at work, in the street - these are the bases for a story.

The main foundations of every state, new states as well as ancient or composite ones, are good laws and good arms you cannot have good laws without good arms, and where there are good arms, good laws inevitably follow.

We cannot attribute to fortune or virtue that which is achieved without either.

To know well the nature of the people one must be a prince, and to know well the nature of princes one must be of the people.

The one who adapts his policy to the times prospers, and likewise that the one whose policy clashes with the demands of the times does not.

Men shrink less from offending one who inspires love than one who inspires fear.

Nature that framed us of four elements, warring within our breasts for regiment, doth teach us all to have aspiring minds.

Hence it comes that all armed Prophets have been victorious, and all unarmed Prophets have been destroyed.

The promise given was a necessity of the past: the word broken is a necessity of the present.

Princes and governments are far more dangerous than other elements within society.

There are three kinds of intelligence: one kind understands things for itself, the other appreciates what others can understand, the third understands neither for itself nor through others. This first kind is excellent, the second good, and the third kind useless.

When science, art, literature, and philosophy are simply the manifestation of personality, they are on a level where glorious and dazzling achievements are possible, which can make a man's name live for thousands of years. But above this level, far above, separated by an abyss, is the level where the highest things are achieved. These things are essentially anonymous.