"That all men are equal is a proposition to which, at ordinary times, no sane human being has ever given his assent."
Literature quotes
Literature
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Literature quotes (page 24 of 201)
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"All literature is a footnote to Faust. I have no idea what I mean by that."
"We know too much, and are convinced of too little. Our literature is a substitute for religion, and so is our religion."
"Leisure without literature is death and burial alive."
"To a true-blue professor of literature in an American university, literature is not something that a plain human being, living today, painfully sits down to produce. No; it is something dead."
"You can travel through literature, and you can expand your mind through literature. It's so cheap to buy that kind of ticket."
"If the urge to write should ever leave me, I want that day to be my last."
"History is full of people who went to prison or were burned at the stake for proclaiming their ideas. Society has always defended itself."
"It is in the thirties that we want friends. In the forties we know they won't save us any more than love did."
"The victor belongs to the spoils."
"Matrimony is the union of meanness and martyrdom."
"The mission of the press is to spread culture while destroying the attention span."
"The struggle of literature is in fact a struggle to escape from the confines of language; it stretches out from the utmost limits of what can be said; what stirs literature is the call and attraction of what is not in the dictionary."
"No compliment can be eloquent, except as an expression of indifference."
"Take all that is given whether wealth, love or language, nothing comes by mistake and with good digestion all can be turned to health."
"No advance in wealth, no softening of manners, no reform or revolution has ever brought human equality a millimeter nearer."
"Madness is tonic and invigorating. It makes the sane more sane. The only ones who are unable to profit by it are the insane."
"One should expect that the expected can be prevented, but the unexpected should have been expected."
"Fame comes only when deserved, and then is as inevitable as destiny, for it is destiny."
"That which the fountain sends forth returns again to the fountain."