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

"Literature is news that stays news"

Ezra Pound, Poet

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

Henry James, Writer

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

Martin H. Fischer, Author

"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

"Literature does not exist in a vacuum. Writers as such have a definite social function exactly proportional to their ability as writers. This is their main use"

Ezra Pound, Poet

"A losing trade, I assure you, sir: literature is a drug"

George Borrow, Author

"Every man's work, whether it be literature, or music or pictures or architecture or anything else, is always a portrait of himself"

Samuel Butler, Poet

"Literature flourishes best when it is half a trade and half an art"

William Ralph Inge, Clergyman

"The total absence of humor from the Bible is one of the most singular things in all literature"

Alfred North Whitehead, Mathematician

"He knew everything about literature except how to enjoy it"

Joseph Heller, Novelist

"Literature is about as unnecessarily necessarily as tableware or ironed shirts"

Peter Bichsel, Writer

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

Ernst Fischer, Writer

"Literature is a luxury; fiction is a necessity"

Gilbert K. Chesterton, Writer

"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

"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

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

Ernest Hemingway, Novelist

"The difficulty of literature is not to write, but to write what you mean; not to affect your reader, but to affect him precisely as you wish"

Robert Louis Stevenson, Writer

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

Thomas Huxley, Scientist

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

Gertrude Stein, Author

"Hemingway's remarks are not literature"

Gertrude Stein, Author

"It is in literature that the concrete outlook of humanity receives its expression"

Alfred North Whitehead, Mathematician

"Religion is part of the human make-up. It's also part of our cultural and intellectual history. Religion was our first attempt at literature, the texts, our first attempt at cosmology, making sense of where we are in the universe, our first attempt at health care, believing in faith healing, our first attempt at philosophy"

Christopher Hitchens, Author

"Literature is the orchestration of platitudes"

Thornton Wilder, Writer

"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

"The instinct to impersonate produces the actor; the desire to provide pleasure by impersonations produces the playwright; the desire to provide this pleasure with adequate characterization and dialogue memorable in itself produces dramatic literature"

George P. Baker

"When the drama attains a characterization which makes the play a revelation of human conduct and a dialogue which characterizes yet pleases for itself, we reach dramatic literature"

George P. Baker

"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

"Personal experience is the basis of all real Literature"

George Henry Lewes, Philosopher

"I think I was a good student, because I jumped over a school. My main interest was basically history and literature. Sports were basically basketball and swimming at a pool. I was so happy"

Shimon Peres, Statesman

"I've always loved films, always. I studied literature and I went to Columbia in New York and I went to Paris for part of one year and ended up staying there"

Jim Jarmusch, Director

"The classics are only primitive literature. They belong to the same class as primitive machinery and primitive music and primitive medicine"

Stephen Leacock, Economist

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

Jose Bergamin, Writer

"Literature is the best way to understand the soul of a nation"

Ismail Kadare, Novelist

"The tradition of Russian literature is also an eastern tradition of learning poetry and prose by heart"

Ryszard Kapuscinski, Journalist

"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"

Sarah Orne Jewett, 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

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