Quotes on Literature

History takes time. History makes memory.

The secret in education lies in respecting the student.

I do not say a proverb is amiss when aptly and reasonably applied, but to be forever discharging them, right or wrong, hit or miss, renders conversation insipid and vulgar.

If youth be a defect, it is one that we outgrow only too soon.

Pray, look better, sir... those things yonder are no giants, but windmills.

Valor lies just halfway between rashness and cowardice.

I have always heard, Sancho, that doing good to base fellows is like throwing water into the sea.

Our greatest foes, and whom we must chiefly combat, are within.

Proverbs are short sentences drawn from long experience.

God bears with the wicked, but not forever.

It is one thing to praise discipline, and another to submit to it.

He who loses wealth loses much; he who loses a friend loses more; but he that loses his courage loses all.

From reading too much, and sleeping too little, his brain dried up on him and he lost his judgment.

For a man to attain to an eminent degree in learning costs him time, watching, hunger, nakedness, dizziness in the head, weakness in the stomach, and other inconveniences.

A life that partakes even a little of friendship, love, irony, humor, parenthood, literature, and music, and the chance to take part in battles for the liberation of others cannot be called 'meaningless'.

Nobody is more dangerous than he who imagines himself pure in heart; for his purity, by definition, is unassailable.

People can cry much easier than they can change.

Children's reading and children's thinking are the rock-bottom base upon which this country will rise. Or not rise. In these days of tension and confusion, writers are beginning to realize that books for children have a greater potential for good or evil than any other form of literature on earth.

The power of the white world is threatened whenever a black man refuses to accept the white world's definitions.

People who treat other people as less than human must not be surprised when the bread they have cast on the waters comes floating back to them, poisoned.

Corruption is worse than prostitution. The latter might endanger the morals of an individual, the former invariably endangers the morals of the entire country.