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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"As far as I have been able to understand, the Japanese seem to keep things close to the vest. Friendly but remote and polite to the point of being invisible. It is in the music, literature, film and art that the Japanese really seem to express themselves."
"The perfect woman perpetrates literature as she perpetrates a small sin: as an experiment, in passing, glancing around to see whether anybody notices--and to make sure that somebody notices."
"Will it, and set to work briskly."
"Man only plays when in the full meaning of the word he is a man, and he is only completely a man when he plays."
"There isn't, even now, a great tradition of novel-writing in Afghanistan. Most of the literature is in the form of poetry."
"Creed and opinion change with time, and their symbols perish; but Literature and its temples are sacred to all creeds and inviolate."
"I do suspect that he is not really necessary to my happiness."
"If things are going untowardly one month, they are sure to mend the next."
"Husbands and wives generally understand when opposition will be vain."
"I had realized in the meantime that action too has its difficulties, and that one can also be led to it by neurosis. We are not saved by politics any more than by literature."
"The world would get along very well without literature. It would get along even better without man."
"For forty years I was conscripted by the absolute, the neurosis. The absolute is gone. There remain countless tasks among which literature is in no way privileged."
"The form [of literature] matters little to me, classical or not."
"All media can muddy the mind. Language leads to literature. It also leads to dogma."
"Because most writers have totally unrealistic concepts of how publishing works."
"Yeah, but now suddenly - you know, universities are notoriously market oriented, too."
"We don't get to know people when they come to us; we must go to them to find out what they are like."
"Literature is a fragment of a fragment. Of all that ever happened, or has been said, but a fraction has been written; and of this but little is extant."
"Only that type of story deserves to be called moral that shows us that one has the power within oneself to act, out of the conviction that there is something better, even against one's own inclination."
"Deeply earnest and thoughtful people stand on shaky footing with the public."
