Literature Quotes: Timeless Wisdom and Inspiration

"A lawyer without history or literature is a mechanic, a mere working mason; if he possesses some knowledge of these, he may venture to call himself an architect"

Walter Scott, Novelist

"I don't know which is more discouraging, literature or chickens"

E. B. White, Writer

"The decline of literature indicates the decline of a nation"

Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe, Writer

"What is wonderful about great literature is that it transforms the man who reads it towards the condition of the man who wrote"

E. M. Forster, Novelist

"Even in literature and art, no man who bothers about originality will ever be original: whereas if you simply try to tell the truth (without caring twopence how often it has been told before) you will, nine times out of ten, become original without ever having noticed it"

C. S. Lewis, Author

"All modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn"

Ernest Hemingway, Novelist

"Facts are not science - as the dictionary is not literature"

Martin H. Fischer, Author

"Great literature must spring from an upheaval in the author's soul. If that upheaval is not present then it must come from the works of any other author which happens to be handy and easily adapted"

Robert Benchley, Comedian

"All literature consists of whatever the writer thinks is cool. The reader will like the book to the degree that he agrees with the writer about what's cool"

Steven Brust, Author

"What fascinated me mostly about Mickey Cohen was that he, in his later years, hired someone to help him to comprehend literature, to help him to read better, to understand words better"

Harvey Keitel, Actor

"Among the letters my readers write me, there is a certain category which is continuously growing, and which I see as a symptom of the increasing intellectualization of the relationship between readers and literature"

Herman Hesse, Author

"It is not Kafka's fault that his wonderful writings have lately turned into a fad, and are read by people who have neither the ability nor the desire to absorb literature"

Herman Hesse, Author

"I think Maus I is better than Maus II. The standard here is whether or not it's as good as a great book of prose literature and by that standard, no, it's not that great"

Ted Rall, Cartoonist

"When they were done downloading all the information off each hard drive, they took all the computers, all the literature, and loaded everything into a big white truck and left"

Sherman Austin

"In French literature, you can choose a la carte; in Spanish literature, there is only the set meal"

Jose Bergamin, Writer

"One of the greatest gifts my brother and I received from my mother was her love of literature and language. With their boundless energy, libraries open the door to these worlds and so many others. I urge young and old alike to embrace all that libraries have to offer"

Caroline Kennedy, Celebrity

"If I could have gone on describing to you the beauties of this region, who knows but I might have made a fine addition to the literature of our age?"

Robert Gould Shaw, Soldier

"To provoke dreams of terror in the slumber of prosperity has become the moral duty of literature"

Ernst Fischer, Writer

"I can say without affectation that I belong to the Russian convict world no less than I do to Russian literature. I got my education there, and it will last forever"

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Author

"Woe to that nation whose literature is cut short by the intrusion of force. This is not merely interference with freedom of the press but the sealing up of a nation's heart, the excision of its memory"

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Author

"Literature transmits incontrovertible condensed experience... from generation to generation. In this way literature becomes the living memory of a nation"

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Author

"Literature becomes the living memory of a nation"

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Author

"Every man's memory is his private literature"

Aldous Huxley, Novelist

"Literature is a luxury; fiction is a necessity"

Gilbert K. Chesterton, Writer

"If literature isn't everything, it's not worth a single hour of someone's trouble"

Jean-Paul Sartre, Philosopher

"The thing that teases the mind over and over for years, and at last gets itself put down rightly on paper whether little or great, it belongs to Literature"

Willa Cather, Author

"It takes a great deal of history to produce a little literature"

Henry James, Writer

"Remarks are not literature"

Gertrude Stein, Author

"Literature - creative literature - unconcerned with sex, is inconceivable"

Gertrude Stein, Author

"Hemingway's remarks are not literature"

Gertrude Stein, Author

"Science and literature are not two things, but two sides of one thing"

Thomas Huxley, Scientist

"Books are the money of Literature, but only the counters of Science"

Thomas Huxley, Scientist

"Literature adds to reality, it does not simply describe it. It enriches the necessary competencies that daily life requires and provides; and in this respect, it irrigates the deserts that our lives have already become"

C. S. Lewis, Author

"The atmosphere of orthodoxy is always damaging to prose, and above all it is completely ruinous to the novel, the most anarchical of all forms of literature"

George Orwell, Author

"Literature is strewn with the wreckage of men who have minded beyond reason the opinions of others"

Virginia Woolf, Author

"It is the nature of the artist to mind excessively what is said about him. Literature is strewn with the wreckage of men who have minded beyond reason the opinions of others"

Virginia Woolf, Author

"This is not writing at all. Indeed, I could say that Shakespeare surpasses literature altogether, if I knew what I meant"

Virginia Woolf, Author

"Literature is my Utopia. Here I am not disenfranchised. No barrier of the senses shuts me out from the sweet, gracious discourses of my book friends. They talk to me without embarrassment or awkwardness"

Helen Keller, Author

"That a literature in our time is living is shown in that way that it debates problems"

Georg Brandes, Critic

"The genius of the Spanish people is exquisitely subtle, without being at all acute; hence there is so much humour and so little wit in their literature"

Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Poet

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