Books Quote by Samuel Johnson

The literary man? An indiscreet man, who devaluates his miseries, divulges them, tells them like so many beads: immodesty-the sideshow of second thoughts-is his…

— Emile M. Cioran

A man who reads a book for no particular profit becomes, while he reads, a gentleman, a man of leisure, a dandy of a…

— John Updike

No man has an appreciation so various that his judgment is good upon all varieties of literary work.

— Mark Twain

A taste for literature and a turn for business, united in the same person, never fails to make a great man.

— John Adams

Literature is the most noble of professions. In fact, it is about the only one fit for a man.

— Edgar Allan Poe

The only literary men are those who have to work at it.

— George Ade

A man is a poet if difficulties inherent in his art provide him with ideas; he is not a poet if they deprive him…

— Paul Valery

Literature nowadays is a trade... the successful man of letters is your skilful tradesman. He thinks first and foremost of the markets.

— George Gissing

A man may be variously accomplished, and yet be a feeble poet.

— George Henry Lewes

Rare almost as great poets, rarer, perhaps, than veritable saints and martyrs; are consummate men of business. A man, to be excellent in this…

— Arthur Helps

Man (in good earnest) is a marvellous vain, fickle, and unstable subject, and on whom it is very hard to form any certain and…

— Michel de Montaigne

A man of letters, merely by reading a phrase, can estimate exactly the literary merit of its author.

— Marcel Proust