Best Literature Sayings

2174 Literature quotes by 1284 unique authors

Savages and modern artists are alike strangely driven to create something uglier than themselves. but the artists find it harder. — Gilbert K. Chesterton
The beautification of the world is not a work of nature, but a work of art, then it involves an artist. — Gilbert K. Chesterton
And all over the world, the old literature, the popular literature, is the same. It consists of very dignified sorrow and very undignified fun. Its… — Gilbert K. Chesterton
The aim of good prose words is to mean what they say. The aim of good poetical words is to mean what they do not… — Gilbert K. Chesterton
I believe that a life of integrity I the most fundamental source of personal worth. I do not agree with the popular success literature that… — Stephen Covey
Universal appreciation of art... belongs to those countries and those ages which are not, or were not, ruled by materialism. Though travel was never so… — Walter J. Phillips
The Old Testament, as everyone who has looked into it is aware, drips with blood; there is, indeed, no more bloody chronicle in all the… — H. L. Mencken
You cannot go outside of A and Z in the realm of literature; likewise Christ Jesus is First and Last of God's new creation, and… — Theodore Austin-Sparks
It has been said that no great work in literature or in science was ever wrought by a man who did not love solitude. We… — Austin Phelps
To write a book is for all the world like humming a song. — Laurence Sterne
Wherein lies a poet's claim to originality? That he invents his incidents? No. That he was present when his episodes had their birth? No. That… — Edith Wharton
...the tale that's told for no other reason but companionship, which is another (and my favorite) definition of literature, the tale that's told for companionship… — Jack Kerouac
The test of literature is, I suppose, whether we ourselves live more intensely for the reading of it. — Elizabeth Drew
Fiction is a web of lies that attempts to entangle the truth. And autobiography may well be the reverse: data tricked up and rearranged to… — Nicholas Delbanco
Memoir is not an act of history, but an act of memory, which is innately corrupt. — Mary Karr
There's no one thing that's true. It's all true. — Ernest Hemingway
The use of literature is to afford us a platform whence we may command a view of our present life, a purchase by which we… — Ralph Waldo Emerson
For me, the promised land, always seeming just beyond my reach, is the poetic masterpiece, that perfect union of words in cadence, each beckoned and… — Unknown Author
For whatever is truly wondrous and fearful in man, never yet was put into words or books. — Herman Melville
In our day the conventional element in literature is elaborately disguised by a law of copyright pretending that every work of art is an invention… — Northrop Frye
The decline in literature indicates a decline in the nation. The two keep pace in their downward tendency. — Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Leisure without literature is death and burial alive. — Seneca the Younger
Perversity is the muse of modern literature. — Susan Sontag
Remarks are not literature. — Gertrude Stein
How has the human spirit ever survived the terrific literature with which it has had to contend? — Wallace Stevens

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