Literature quotes
4K quotes on this topic — from poets, philosophers, and thinkers across history.
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Browse quotes that often appear alongside literature — connected by shared ideas and recurring themes.
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"I am the enfant terrible of literature and science. If I cannot, and I know I cannot, get the literary and scientific bigwigs to give me a shilling, I can, and I know I can, heave bricks into the middle of them."
"I have nothing but wastes and wilds of self-translation before me for many miserable months to come."
"The situation is that of him who is helpless, cannot act, in the event cannot paint, since he is obliged to paint. The act is of him who, helpless, unable to act, acts, in the event paints, since he is obliged to paint."
"What is well done, I feel as if I did; what is ill-done, I reck not of."
"Literature is eavesdropping."
"Is all literature eavesdropping, and all art Chinese imitation? our life a custom, and our body borrowed, like a beggar’s dinner, from a hundred charities?"
"Society has really no graver interest than the well-being of the literary class."
"Religious literature has eminent examples, and if we run over our private list of poets, critics, philanthropists and philosophers, we shall find them infected with this dropsy and elephantiasis, which we ought to have tapped."
"Proverbs are the literature of reason, or the statements of absolute truth, without qualification. Like the sacred books of each nation, they are the sanctuary of its intuitions."
"I often say I've spent more time with photography than I have with literature just in terms of hours."
"Nothing odd will do long. Tristram Shandy did not last."
"The richest author that ever grazed the common of literature."
"I respect Millar, sir: he has raised the price of literature."
"The world wavered and quivered and threatened to burst into flames."
"There is no room for the impurities of literature in an essay."
"This is not writing at all. Indeed, I could say that Shakespeare surpasses literature altogether, if I knew what I meant."
"That complete statement which is literature."
"Literature is no one’s private ground, literature is common ground; let us trespass freely and fearlessly and find our own way for ourselves."
"These weren't cheap modern books; these were books bound in leather, and not just leather, but leather from clever cows who had given their lives for literature after a happy existence in the very best pastures."
"In theory it was, around now, Literature. Susan hated Literature. She'd much prefer to read a good book."
