Literature Quotes

500+ Sourced quotes

Jean Cocteau

Ezra Pound

Mao Zedong

Anton Chekhov

George Steiner

Hugh Blair

Nelson Algren

There is in fact no such thing as art for art's sake, art that stands above classes, art that is detached from or independent of politics. Proletarian literature and art are part of the whole proletarian revolutionary cause.

The greatest masterpiece in literature is only a dictionary out of order.

I feel more confident and more satisfied when I reflect that I have two professions and not one. Medicine is my lawful wife and literature is my mistress. When I get tired of one I spend the night with the other. Though it's disorderly it's not so dull, and besides, neither really loses anything, through my infidelity.

Take a commonplace, clean it and polish it, light it so that it produces the same effect of youth and freshness and originality and spontaneity as it did originally, and you have done a poet's job. The rest is literature.

A great age of literature is perhaps always a great age of translations.

The test of literature is, I suppose, whether we ourselves live more intensely for the reading of it.

Elizabeth A. Drew

Science means simply the aggregate of all the recipes that are always successful. All the rest is literature.

The contemporary thing in art and literature is the thing which doesn't make enough difference to the people of that generation so that they can accept it or reject it.

Change is the principal feature of our age and literature should explore how people deal with it. The best science fiction does that, head-on.

Everything is becoming science fiction. From the margins of an almost invisible literature has sprung the intact reality of the 20th century.

Literature is the orchestration of platitudes.

Thornton Wilder

All bad Literature rests upon imperfect insight, or upon imitation, which may be defined as seeing at second-hand.

George Henry Lewes

Literature is made upon any occasion that a challenge is put to the legal apparatus by conscience in touch with humanity.

Literature is a state of culture, poetry is a state of grace, before and after culture.

Juan Ramón Jiménez

We are human, and nothing is more interesting to us than humanity. The appeal of literature is that it is so thoroughly a human thing — by, for and about human beings. If you lose that focus, you obviate the source of the power and permanence of literature.

Music is the literature of the heart; it commences where speech ends.

Variant translation: Music is the literature of the heart, it takes up communication where words stop.

Alphonse de Lamartine

In its conception the literature prize belongs to days when a writer could still be thought of as, by virtue of his or her occupation, a sage, someone with no institutional affiliations who could offer an authoritative word on our times as well as on our moral life. (It has always struck me as strange, by the way, that Alfred Nobel did not institute a philosophy prize, or for that matter that he instituted a physics prize but not a mathematics prize, to say nothing of a music prize - music is, after all, more universal than literature, which is bound to a particular language.) The idea of writer as sage is pretty much dead today. I would certainly feel very uncomfortable in the role.

Literature is without proofs. By which it must be understood that it cannot prove, not only what it says, but even that it is worth the trouble of saying it.

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

The great standard of literature as to purity and exactness of style is the Bible.

Our American professors like their literature clear and cold and pure and very dead.

When once the itch of literature comes over a man, nothing can cure it but the scratching of a pen.

Books are the carriers of civilization. Without books, history is silent, literature dumb, science crippled, thought and speculation at a standstill.

Barbara W. Tuchman

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

A copy of Dante's Purgatorio excited his especial disgust. "French, eh?" he said. "I guessed as much, and pretty dirty too, I shouldn't wonder. Now just you wait while I look up these here books"—how he said it!—"in my list. Particularly against books the Home Secretary is. If we can't stamp out literature in the country, we can at least stop its being brought in from outside."